Robots on Main Street? After Hearing Boston Dynamics' Chad Wright, I Can't Wait

Chad Wright played a video of a humanoid robot running, flipping, and getting to work. Then he turned to the room and asked how it made us feel.

"Does it frighten you? Does it give you pause? Does it make you curious? As technologists, does it inspire you?"

My answer was easy. It excites me.

Chad is the Chief Information Officer at Boston Dynamics, the company behind Spot, the yellow robot dog, and Atlas, the humanoid. He gave the opening keynote at the NH Tech Alliance Innovation Summit in Nashua this week. Before Boston Dynamics he spent years at Amazon Robotics, so he's seen robots at a scale most of us never will.

Some people find this scary

I get it. A robot walking down the sidewalk is the opening scene of a lot of movies that end badly. Chad hears the worry everywhere he goes. "Everywhere I go people ask me, will robots take my job?"

He didn't wave it away. Boston Dynamics talks about building robots as "introducing a new species to the world," and he said that comes with a lot of responsibility. The company has an ethics committee, and it works with lawmakers on rules for using robots safely.

His honest answer to the job question was "it depends."

Then he gave numbers from his Amazon years. Over about a decade, Amazon deployed close to 700,000 robots in its warehouses. In that same stretch, he said, it created about a million jobs, including roughly 700 new kinds of jobs that only existed because the robots did.

One of those new jobs has a great name: robot wrangler. That's the person who runs, supports, and maintains the robots. Chad brought his own wrangler along, Brady Barnett, who runs IT service operations at Boston Dynamics. And he said he'd driven past Lakes Region Community College here in New Hampshire and seen a sign inviting people to come train as one.

I find it exciting

I want the robot carrying the groceries. I want the one that walks into the power station so a person doesn't have to. I want a world where the heavy, boring, risky work gets handled, and people get their hours back for the work that needs a person.

That's the same thing I believe about AI on a laptop. It should take the busywork so you can do the business. Chad said it in his own words: AI is leaving the screen. The same AI that drafts your emails in ChatGPT is starting to move, see, and pick things up.

He sees three kinds of coworkers coming. People, "doing the thinking, the relationship building, the problem solving." AI agents, crunching data and drafting reports. And robots, taking the work that's "dirty, dull, dangerous."

What I loved most was the room. Plenty of people find this future scary, and it was good to sit with a crowd that found it exciting, people who look at a robot and see possibility.

Bring the robot to lunch

My favorite story from the talk was a small one. Chad asked his field engineers what it's like when a customer gets their first robot. The robot's usually set up and working within a week or two. So what happens that first week?

"They bring the robot to lunch."

People walk Spot into the lunchroom. They touch it, take pictures of it, drive it around. They get to know their new coworker before it starts working next to them.

Any team getting a new tool, AI or otherwise, can borrow that. Give people a low-stakes way to meet it first. Let them poke at it. It's the same idea Melanie McDonough shared later that morning about turning AI skeptics into advocates.

The $10 mindset

Then Chad said the line I wrote down fastest all day.

He imagined someone in the audience thinking: we're not a car company, I don't have millions of dollars, I don't have a $10 million budget.

"You don't need a $10 million budget. You need a $10 mindset that says, I'm not going to take human capacity and waste it on a mundane task."

He meant robots. It works just as well for a five-person business deciding where to start with AI. His advice was the same advice I give owners:

• Pick one problem. One process you think you can improve.
• Pick one measurable result. Hours saved, turnaround time, errors caught.
• Start small and treat it as learning. He called a first robot "a learning investment." He also said robots are starting to be offered as a monthly service, the way software is, so smaller businesses can try them without buying outright.
• Reinvest what you save. Let the first win pay for the next one.

His last slide had three takeaways: be clear on the problem, have a plan for the humans, and think of robots "as co-pilots and not rivals."

I'd add one of my own. Be excited. The future Chad described has more help in it, and I'm glad I got to sit in a room full of people who wanted to build it.

If you want to start with the AI you already have, Business Brain is a good first step. It gives any AI your voice, your customers, and how you work, so it can take real busywork off your plate. And if you'd like to talk through where your $10 mindset should start, reach out.

More from the summit: Crystal Pee Bowman on writing an AI policy your team will use.