AI-driven robotics is set to reshape much of industry. An example is with the company MBBody AI. The firm, a technology infrastructure company that provides the intelligence layer to power the autonomous workforce of the future, is led by John Fowler, CEO and Director of MBody AI.
Fowler is an experienced public company executive involved in building and scaling companies in high-growth and emerging markets. Digital Magazine spoke with Fowler about the potential of AI-driven robotics and the effect of this form of automation on the future economy.
MBody AI has expanded its operations in Canada with a dedicated presence in Ontario.
Digital Jornal: Can you start by sharing a little about your background and an overview of MBOdy AI?
John Fowler: We deploy, manage and expand robotic workforces for large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, under multi-year agreements. Everything goes through one platform: MBOdy AI Orchestrator™a proprietary, hardware-agnostic system that coordinates a wide range of task-specific robots as a unified workforce, dynamically assigning tasks and optimizing workflows across facilities. To date, the majority of our placements have been in hospitality, primarily casino and resort operators, where we have provided cleaning services cumulatively to approximately 561 million square feet.
After some bad life choices, I found myself with a law degree on the wall and started a trading and securities practice. I quickly discovered that clients had better lives and more interesting stories than partners, so I was looking to leave. In 2014, I left law to run Supreme Cannabis Company, a medical cannabis company I started that year, which eventually went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange and was acquired by Canopy Growth in 2021. In that time, we raised and distributed more than $250,000,000 and built an organization of about 1,00 people at scale. At one point we were growing so fast that we had to rent out the local hockey arena for a weekend to conduct job interviews.
Cannabis and robots are clearly different, but there is a unifying theme of innovation and change. In both, we were in the early days of a social change with no roadmap to follow. That’s what’s exciting here. Companies across all labor-intensive industries face rising labor costs, labor availability challenges, and increasing operational complexity in distributed locations. As they turn to robots to fill jobs that staff struggle with, a new problem emerges: coordination and orchestration become harder, not easier, as fleets grow in size and complexity. This is where we focus.
DJ: What is MBOdy AI’s core platform and how does it differ from other AI-driven robotic solutions on the market?
Fowler: Our core platform is the MBody AI Orchestrator™, a proprietary technology platform that coordinates fleets of robots as a unified workforce, dynamically assigning tasks and optimizing workflows across facilities. You can think of it as an agent manager for robotic employees. Just as a human manager learns his business and operations, assigns work, checks if it’s done, and responds to surprises, we do this with Orchestrator.
The benefit of doing it with technology is that we can analyze and evaluate every data point available to us, with the goal of continually improving our client’s key metrics.
The platform separates itself from competitors by being hardware agnostic. Most companies in this space will sell you a bot with its own hardware, its own software, and a siled program to run it. MBody AI Orchestrator™ instead gives enterprises an integrated robotics workforce that is managed, measured and scaled across any brand of hardware through one platform. It brings many types of robots into a single system so they can communicate and work more efficiently. Every robot, every job, a system. This is our mantra.
DJ: What metrics or key indicators do you focus on to measure performance in your solutions?
Fowler: MBody has real robots doing real work for Fortune 500 clients today, with revenue and repeat business behind it. Our most successful installations increase efficiency and provide around-the-clock service that was previously difficult to obtain, either due to labor shortages or jobs that people no longer want to do.
At the finance and c-suite level, our customers are looking for a return on their investment: can robots do the job at a lower cost than the existing workforce while maintaining quality? So we measure productivity, uptime and cost to complete specific jobs. At the operations level, we typically hear a more qualitative story: can technology help get work done, improve the guest or customer experience, and free up other staff to focus on higher-value work?
For example, we had a client in the gaming and hospitality industry with a key hallway that needed cleaning at least once a day by a human crew.
After introducing a robotic fleet, the customer now cleans the same corridor to the same standard three times a day. This allows them to demonstrate a commitment to service through a 24/7 robotics workforce. They told us the technology “transformed our operations” and improved the guest experience. This is the kind of result we are looking for.
Beyond that, we work to simplify the use of robotics for our customers. Our multi-year deals are all driven through one platform, MBOdy AI Orchestrator™. We recently announced a partnership with Buyer’s Edge Platform that connects their procurement network with our autonomous solutions. Our customers aren’t just buying robots, they’re investing in a consistent and reliable result that we manage end-to-end across every brand of hardware.
DJ: Why is it important for robotics solutions in enterprise industries to communicate with each other?
Fowler: Just as it’s important for your human workforce to communicate, it’s important for your robotic workforce to work together instead of in separate silos. The sum of the robotic workforce is much greater than its parts. Think about human staff: if everyone was an individual contributor who was good at their job but never spoke to a colleague, it would be a disaster. That’s where bots are today, good individual contributors but hard to get into a team. We are solving this with Orchestrator.
The problem is related to adoption. As robot penetration increases, so does the diversity of the robotic workforce: more jobs, more types of robots, more vendors. Today, each original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has its own ecosystem of control applications, operating procedures, and maintenance and service. We bring it to a single platform, so the customer doesn’t face additional complexity as the fleet grows. Instead of a fragmented system that can be a headache for even the most experienced IT leader, MBody AI Orchestrator™ provides a single solution that houses them all.
The companies we work with are leaders in their industries, but they are not experts in robotics or robotic workforce management. This is where they address us. We offer a managed, hardware-agnostic robotic workforce tailored to a company’s needs. This allows clients to focus on what they do best and move current employees into higher value, revenue-generating work without having to become bot experts. We handle the botnet, so they don’t have to.
DJ: Where do you see the robotics industry going in the next 5 years and what is MBody’s place in it?
Fowler: The current market sees two important forces converging at the right time: labor costs are rising and labor availability is tightening, while robotics hardware has finally moved from novelty to real value. MBOdy AI sits at that intersection, helping customers move from isolated pilot programs to coordinated robotic fleets precisely in areas where enterprises struggle to hire and retain a workforce.
Our focus for the foreseeable future is on three things: expanding our footprint into new markets, growing within our existing Fortune 500 accounts, and deepening the Orchestrator platform to deliver more value as the embedded robotics market grows.
We expect these systems to continue to become more common among large enterprises, ranging from hospitality. The underlying driver is clear: rising labor costs and tightening availability in labor-intensive industries. As adoption grows, the coordination problem grows with it, and that’s the problem we exist to solve. Robots that can’t work seamlessly together become a hindrance rather than a net positive, and getting this coordination right is how enterprises realize the return on investment.
The one thing I would leave you with: while many companies are focused on specific robotic solutions, we act as the coordination layer or operating system that brings together disparate systems into a single, unified workforce. This is the story worth watching in this industry.
