Seeing some posts here about “What's the next big thing?” People talking about sexy bullshit use cases for AI. Self driving cars/trucks and whatever comes out of Musk's big head.
I'm telling you, the next big AI/robotic movement isn't going to sexy or amazing. It's going to save companies a lot of money and be relatively low risk/low visibility. Just like the conversational AI with customer service and stuff like that.
The next big move is cleaning bots. There is a company called Bunzl, which probably nobody ever heard of but they trade in London and have an OTC symbol. They are, I think, either the largest or longest running cleaning supplies company in the world. I forget which. Maybe both. That stuff you see in public washrooms in office buildings, malls etc., they are the ones distributing it. They are currently working on a cleaning bot solution. People think of Rosey from the Jetsons. We aren't there yet. But cleaning bots are progressing and don't have the Skynet or general safety concerns of something like self-driving vehicles. Janitors also don't have the public sympathy or union support like truck drivers would. Usually just poor immigrants who can be done away with once they are no longer needed and no one will care.
Think of cleaning bots kind of like zombie janitors. They have enough “AI” to perform their tasks, but not enough AI to actually be proactive in deciding which tasks to do and when. They need a centralized system run by someone to tell them what to do. That centralized system is being deployed as we speak. This is what is happening in Queen's University in Canada, one of the ground zero test cases:
https://bunzlcanada.ca/queens-u-students-give-residence-cleaning-an-a/
Instead of janitorial checkups at set times, a QR code system exists to ping the centralized system whenever cleanup or supplies are needed. If you read the article, you see early results have been positive. Eventually the software is going to be deployed all over the place, then the bots deployed to replace humans. It's going to happen in a blink of an eye. I think a good comparison will be self-checkout lanes in grocery stores. There was initially some pushback, but the pushback was so weak and short-lived that people just accept it as normal now.
Bunzl will benefit huge from this change, particularly since the perception is that they are some backwards old school company selling toilet paper. And haven't gone the way of Dunder Mifflin yet only because toilet paper can't be replaced by emails. This change in perception from shitty old school company into “holy shit these guys were progressive after all” is going to lift the stock. But they won't be the biggest percentage winners. The software isn't owned by Bunzl. It's owned by a penny stock in Canada (literally trading at 2 cents). I'm not going to mention the company but I will mention that I own 5 million shares and 5 million warrants in it. I am betting big that this thing is going to catch on fire once this cleaning bot program is out. You can PM me for the company name or Google “Bunzl teams up with shitty penny stock company out of Canada” and probably find the name easily enough if you care.
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