Slalom’s Chris Thomas explains the growing artificial intelligence use cases for its AI-powered robotic dog named Spot.

The use cases for Slalom’s AI-powered robotic dog, Spot, are growing at a rapid pace thanks to Google’s Gemini AI and edge computing innovation.

At Google Cloud Next 2024, Spot could be seen walking around and in between thousands of attendees with monitors showing what the robotic dog was seeing—from infrared vision to its data collection.

Spot is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and edge technology, also equipped with a variety of cameras and sensors, including 360-degree and thermal sensing capabilities.

“I’m here today to show you the future of robotics and AI,” Chris Thomas, a technology and innovation specialist at Slalom, told CRN at Google Cloud Next.

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“Now you’ve got robots that can not only perform one task, but can do general purpose tasks—whether that’s picking up items, moving things around, interacting with its environment,” Thomas said. “Gemini 1.5 Pro has the ability to have over 1 million tokens of data. Those tokens can be things like streaming video, … it can be text data, it can be audio so if you speak to the robot. And the more information you give the model, the more it can actually reason within that data set and actually interact with you.”

Slalom’s Spot AI Use Cases

Seattle-based Slalom is a global consulting and services all-star channel partner and winner of Google’s 2024 Partner of the Year Award for Services in the United States.

Slalom leverages its robotic dogs for AI use cases, particularly in manufacturing around inventory checking, although other industry use cases are on the rise.

“We love, obviously, working with manufacturing use cases. There’s so much investment in manufacturing—whether it’s inspections or other types of manufacturing like automation or optimizing sort of routes and stuff like that. Those are all very important,” Thomas said. “There’s also use cases in medical industries, as well as airline industries and retail.”

One recent Spot use case in 2024 was when Slalom teamed up with Hitachi America and Ericsson.

Hitachi America R&D recently tested an automated quality inspection solution for Hitachi Rail. The solution combined Slalom’s robotic dog, Ericsson private 5G and Hitachi’s industrial AI models with the goal of detecting issues—such as dents, defects, or scratches—on train and rail vehicles.

Slalom said the outcome was a “quality inspection process that enables uncompromised passenger safety.”

Robotics is an emerging trend in the AI market as tech companies are leveraging robotics to enhance operations around warehouse logistics, manufacturing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other industries.

In fact, the global AI Robotics market is projected to reach $17 billion this year, according to market research firm Statista, expected to grow annually by 25 percent over the next five years.

Spot Was Slalom’s First Official ‘Robotic Employee’

Spot joined Slalom in October 2021 from Boston Dynamics as the company’s first robotic employee and Autonomous Innovation Specialist.

In addition to daily tours of Slalom’s element lab212 in New York City, Spot regularly engages with clients to assist them in their remote data acquisition and automation efforts.

“Spot is excited to show clients how they can step into the future where humans and robots work collaboratively augmenting each other’s skills and abilities,” Slalom said on Spot’s LinkedIn page. “When not busy at the lab, Spot enjoys walks around the neighborhood interacting with other canine friends and helping humans appreciate his robotic abilities.”