Trust is the new oil. Here is why.
Why trust will be the most important metric to track for agency owners.
Image: anim3d/TurboSquid
“Knock knock.”
“Who is there?”
“Your pizza delivery robot. One salami, two margherita, one carciofi. If you invite me in, I can set up your table and do other tasks.”
“Other tasks?”
“Sure Simon, let me propose some quick tasks I can do for you:
You play with your family while I take some boring stuff from your checklist, like groceries.
I reduce your grocery costs, by putting together a buying club with your neighbors to bulk buy.
I can improve your meal plan (less proteins maybe? I know you trying that for a looong time….) And let’s be honest Simon, you’re too Italian to actually finish that…
Improve the safety of your home (I can be a sentry at home all night long, noting various problems before you wake up).
Optimize the home, even tracking what clothes you wear by whether they disappeared from the home during the day. “Hey your older son needs new shoes, he is wearing the same ones since 446 days”.
Organize fun experiences? “Hey, let’s watch the Beyonce concert tonight (we’ll even be part of the concert). You wanna come?”
Introduce new bartering systems with your neighbors. Trading of food or, even, tools. “Hey, I’ll pay $5 to borrow a screwdriver.” Simon I can arrange all sorts of things to be moved around the neighborhood. Just gimme a moment to scan what’s going on… Ok?
Image: Tesla
That “Ok” will take longer though.
Why?
Trust is built over time
Because most people (including myself) are not used to trust a robot.
And if you remember the article from last week, the 3 things that build trust need time:
Image: Strategy Sprints
It will be the first time a product introduces itself to consumers at their front doors and once inside will bring a wholesale change to all the brands inside. Most of them will go away. The robot will – over the years – replace “old brands” with “new brands” that do the same thing, but better. It’ll even change the showerheads to new models to save energy and water.
Skeptics are right to point out this won’t happen soon. But by 2028 we expect such a robot will be in people’s homes and the Robotaxi (think of Uber without a human driver) will demand the inclusion of a humanoid robot that can do things like deliver dinner or groceries.
And that is just the start….
The robot brings other robots. (The autonomous vehicle, er, a robot, will bring the humanoid robot to your home, which will bring other, more specialized robots in. This turns everything into a service).
Image: Tesla
That statement alone brings radical shifts to the economy.
Why hasn’t this happened yet?
Until now robots were too expensive to be used for general consumer uses.
But as we speak, things are changing rapidly…
Image: Strategy Sprints
First Ten Years: Owning the Delivery and Home Services Markets
Expectations for Tesla Optimus
For Tesla to really 3x in price by 2028, as we expect, these things need to be true:
1. It should lift at least 55 lbs. Why that much? That is what you can pack and check on an airline. It might need to assist someone loading such a bag into a trunk.
2. It needs to be very quiet. Even when moving around you should never hear it, or only when it has to open a drawer or a door. On the other hand, that might be unnerving for people, so “Hey Tesla can you play some music while walking around?”
3. It needs to be able to communicate, via voice and hand signals, along with a screen on its face with humans. Switching modes to what the human prefers. For instance, the robot could switch to sign language for a deaf customer.
4. It needs to walk fast enough to keep up with a human entering, say, a RoundTable Pizza. Oh, heck, Boston Dynamics has robots that do parkour (jumping off of buildings), so maybe we need a little more than just a slow walk, no?
5. It needs to be able to get into, and out of, a Tesla vehicle, including putting on and off a seat belt. For extra credit, it could “assist” the car in driving tasks, for instance, by using its higher resolution cameras to see further and have better data to more accurately predict speed of oncoming traffic.
6. It must figure out how to either knock on the door (without leaving a mark) or ring the doorbell.
7. It must be able to carry a package of goods, such as pizzas, from the cargo area to the front door while always keeping them horizontal. Same with a cake. Same with eggs. Can’t break anything or drop anything.
8. It must show the beginnings of a personality with ability to entertain and delight. In other words, it must have conversational skills that so far computers haven’t demonstrated.
9. It must prove that it will be able to bring more services into the home than is possible otherwise (business model of robot bringing other robots).
10. It must demonstrate that it will never hurt humans, children or animals.
We’ll also be watching for skills that will be needed in both factory work as well as home service work. For instance, can it install a towel rack at home? The skills it would need will be similar to putting in an electric engine into a vehicle on an assembly line.
Why wouldn’t Tesla own the delivery and home services markets if it delivered a humanoid robot that does all that?
Wasn’t data the new oil??
Yes data is still the new oil. Of all the companies in the AI race (Tesla, Apple, Google, Niantic, Meta, Bytedance) whick one will win?
The one with the biggest available data set.
That’s why many strategists are trying to find new sources of data. NVIDIA laid out the ultimate end of this strategy, one datasystem that drives everything: robots, autonomous vehicles, Augmented Reality, and virtual beings.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse is the best laid out example, but others are being built at Tesla, Apple, Google, Niantic, Meta, Bytedance, among others.
Digital twins
This hydra needs the data to build a digital twin of everything. What is a digital twin? Think of it as a very faithful digital copy of the real world. Our factories, malls, parks, and other things will soon all have at least one copy. In some places, like Times Square, we can see that there will be hundreds of millions of copies. You could leave pictures or videos of your family on top of this digital twin. And that is just the start. By 2025, Lumus, an optics company building the displays that will be in future Augmented Reality glasses, showed us that this digital twin will let us watch a concert in a new way. All around our couch will be a music festival and, thanks to Spatial Audio, it’ll sound concert level too. In some cases what people will hear in their AirPods Pro will be better than what they will hear at a professional concert. Even a high-end one, like Coachella. Augmented Reality headphones there “augmented” the audio, making it better. You could turn up the bass, for instance, or remove crowd noise or, turn down the concert to a more acceptable level. Business travelers already know that the best noise-canceling headphones block out a screaming baby in the seat next to you.
After looking at how fast all the systems that go into building a robot are improving we now believe the humanoid robot of 2030 will be so good that humans who have one in their home a lot will feel that they are their friends and associates. If they are that good, all kind of boring tasks will be handed over to them…
Image: Tesla
Tesla AI and Its Simulator Advantage
Every Tesla car that gets upgraded with its latest AI stack (it calls it FSD Beta) ends up uploading about 30 gigabytes of data up to its neural network in the Tesla cloud (the new version of that Tesla calls “Dojo”).
That feeds a simulator that lets researchers “walk around” what looks like the real world. With moving pedestrians, bikers, hundreds of cars, and more.
It is this simulator that is one of Tesla’s many secret advantages. The simulator shows off the advantage of having huge amounts of data generated by an army of Tesla robots (cars) moving around the world.
It lets AI researchers train new AI models to do new tasks. In 2021 Tesla introduced an auto tagger into the system, which brought about a huge shift in how these systems can learn. The AI already knows hundreds of thousands of objects in the real world and automatically tags anything that it knows well. This speeds up the ability of the AI to start automatically learning.
Which is where we are headed. There are plenty of examples of AI simulations and robots that start with knowing nothing, and over time by trying thousands of little experiments, they figure out how to walk and move on their own.
Tesla has the advantage of being able to study humans in a new way while driving around the real world. Already its researchers needed to train its AI models to understand human movement. What does the data from a human running, or walking, or biking look like? It needed to do that to properly behave around humans in the streets.
This research will give Tesla a lead when it comes to building humanoid robots. It will use the simulator to train robots to do a wide variety of tasks, long before Tesla makes a physical robot that can walk into your kitchen.
Image: anim3d/TurboSquid
How Does It Progress Over Ten Years?
The next ten years will see radical change due to Spatial Computing:
Augmented Reality glasses are worn by the majority of people.
Autonomous vehicles are everywhere on our streets.
Virtual beings hang out with us all day long.
Robots of all types are working all around us.
Many homes now have solar AND backup batteries AND an electric vehicle charging station.
AI systems now ingest massive amounts of data every day and can hallucinate back to you complex scenes, along with running everything in life. The AI foundation models that bring us things like Dall-e are going to look very quaint in a decade.
Here some predictions for the humanoid robot specifically in 2033:
It will have much higher resolution imaging sensors (cameras, LIDARs, etc.) than today. By 2033, cameras on autonomous vehicles and robots will go from the 1K they are today to 32K. That means they can see further, and smaller, things. So now where it might have struggled to pick up a very small screw before, now it can see it without any problem. It also means a robot in an older autonomous vehicle will be able to “assist” the original vehicle and see further.
Most tasks in the home will be turned into services by then. By then it can even install many consumer electronics, or even a shower rack in the bathroom.
It takes over the management of the home (laundry, dishes, garbage, security, and monitoring and controlling all lights, appliances, vehicles, charging, and more).
At homes that have an electric car charging station, the robot will meet an incoming vehicle and plug it in for charging. This will make the Robotaxi system more resilient and let it get vehicles back on the road after a charge.
Robots will run many businesses that only cater to the automated vehicle network (making food that gets delivered to people’s homes, for instance).
An “air traffic control system” that runs the transportation as a service that Elon Musk calls “Robotaxi” will make sure robots and autonomous vehicles are sent to the right place at the right time. This is difficult because when there are large concerts, for instance, like Coachella, this control system will need to move thousands of cars from around the Western United States to Palm Springs to move people around there (we visited Uber’s effort at that festival to understand the traffic control and movement issues involved).
Humanoid robots used to be “janky” because they couldn’t do a wide variety of things well. Those days are gone – AI rapidly learned to get better.
Humanoid robots are very advanced with interacting with humans as compared to today. It won’t be unusual to have long, detailed conversations with your robot.
The network will be a lot smarter than today. Your robot will know everything that is happening across the world, in real time. It can read every single tweet. You certainly can’t.
The robot will enable new services in your home, like telepresence that goes way beyond what Zoom makes possible today.
Automatic shopping services are common. Consumers learned to trust their autonomous vehicles with their lives and, so, hand over shopping to the robot who, from that point on, always makes sure your refrigerator has milk for the kids.
What really gets fun is when you mix robots, autonomous vehicles, together with Augmented Reality glasses. That brings effects that will be hard to predict. After all, when movie cameras and cinemas were invented how many more decades did it take for Star Wars to show up?
But we can see people getting a few robots to come over for Friday evening with their friends, and the robots will serve dinner and then will perform a short skit for entertainment after dinner. You’ll wear your Augmented Reality glasses and that will “dress up” your robot in different characters. Immersion is really improved when your robot hands you things while inside an immersive experience. This is how 2033 could be very weird compared to today.
The Big Picture
What are the possible larger impacts of the Tesla Optimus? With the Optimus comes an increase in home services spending, as well as an opportunity for Tesla to control the complete supply chain of products that Optimus uses in the home.
The increase in home services spending comes from consumers buying the services that Optimus can do – those services that a person does not have time to do, or just does not want to do. Optimus can serve the same kind of function that a housekeeper or maid has, but can handle more work at the same time and for a much longer period of time.
Additionally, Optimus can do things in the home that a housekeeper cannot, such as run diagnostics on major appliances and gauge how they are performing and if they are running efficiently. It could also do this for the Tesla car in a person’s garage, as well as ready it for use in the morning which is really useful to tired, hard-working families and professionals.
In addition to these functions, it could serve as a very energetic handyman, plumber, housepainter, etc. Doing all these services and replacing traditional professionals significantly changes the dynamics of the home services market. This disruption has the potential to substantially enlarge that market due to the efficiencies and superior attention to detail and physical strength of Optimus.
In terms of how Optimus would be made available to consumers, there would probably be several different channels for this. One possibility would be for a company to buy several Optimuses and rent or lease them out. Another would be direct purchases by upper-class families, and a third way could be the buying of community Optimuses by homeowners associations (HOAs), neighborhoods or cities.
In the process of its work, the Optimus will be using cleaning products and house improvement and handyman goods. For ease and scale, Tesla has the opportunity to make direct deals with the companies that provide these since it would need these in bulk. In this way, Tesla could control the complete supply chain of these products and goods for the Optimus; companies that make these products and goods would line up to be included since the sales volume would be so high.
While it is difficult to currently assess how big the potential market will be for the Optimus, it would encompass a large majority of upper middle and upper class people with families, as well as single, childless professionals, first in the U.S.and then, in other parts of the world.
The economic impact that the Optimus brings, taking into account even a mid-market penetration, will be significant. Why? Because the potential market is so big. Because Optimus can do such a wide range of tasks, it will be relatively more efficient and will consolidate and increase the need for its services. The Optimus can go to a home and perform many varied services during that visit that would usually take four or five different kinds of workers. People who would not have been enticed before for certain home services would now take advantage of having those services done. Why not? If the Optimus can cook, mow the lawn, paint, babysit, diagnose electrical issues and so much more, it is very convenient for it to do many-varied tasks during any visit.
What is the impact on the workers the Optimus replaces? Yes, this has the potential of putting many different categories of service people out of business. Robotics and automation tend to have that effect in all kinds of areas of life. We don’t have an answer as to what will happen to the displaced workers, we only know that it will happen.
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About the author
Simon Severino helps agency owners automate 85% of their B2B sales. He is the CEO of Strategy Sprints and Host of the top 2,5% podcast called "Strategy Sprints". He created the Strategy Sprints™ Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds. Simon teaches Certified Strategy Sprints™ Coaches to scale agencies via better systems. As a member of SVBS (Silicon Valley Blockchain Society) he enables cross-stage capital flows and helps minimize execution risks in tech scale ups. His team is trusted by Google, Consilience Ventures, BMW, Roche, Amgen, AbbVie and hundreds of frontier teams. He is a TEDx speaker, and has appeared on over 800 podcasts. He writes for Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine about scaling digital agencies.