The following transcript was produced by AI and not carefully edited.
Matt Reynolds: But what's the other side of the coin? What? What's keeping people from, or what's preventing brands, CPGs, and even contract packages? What are the hurdles that are preventing them from making a big leap and investing in automation and robotics?
Sean Riley: Well, investing in robotics and automation is, is the key word, because, and I admit that I was, I guess, a bit naive about this going into it. I really thought that besides,I really think that besides the labor issues, the biggest trend still seems to be cost, and specifically getting the C suite or the procurement to buy in to me, that was surprising, as we've been hearing, you know, at least for the past couple years, that automation has come down so that, you know, I thought it had kind of reached justifiable levels, but that's not my money that's being spent. So it's easy for me to say, ' go out and buy automation. ' It's cheaper than it used to be. To cite the data procurement came in ninth as an ally for implementation, which surprised me, but it came in first as a hurdle. I think that also sort of revealed, I guess, that our audience contained fewer larger companies, and maybe, at least in the survey audience, a lot of small or medium sized businesses, maybe some mom and pops, where those in charge of the purse strings are perceived to give the most resistance to added spending.
Matt Reynolds: Good, yeah, and that's another trend that we found in various different of these annual Outlook Reports, often to be able to make change, whether it's for sustainability changes, to change materials, or to add more workforce, or to, you know, spend more money on training up work for us, or to make the investment in in automation robotics, you often need some sort of internal champion, or somebody who's going to be able to to spell out the ROI on whether it's a new robot or it's a new training program for people, whatever it is, all these things cost money. And if the bean counters, for lack of a better word, sorry, procurement people don't see that that well documented, well delineated, ROI, then that's that expenditure is not going to happen, that capex is not going to become available.
