What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
AI-Powered Workflows: How Zebra Technologies is Transforming Frontline Operations
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The frontline workforce revolution is happening right now, and Zebra Technologies is leading the charge. In this enlightening conversation with Joe White, Chief Product and Solution Officer at Zebra Technologies, we explore how decades of operational digitization are culminating in an AI-powered transformation that's redefining what's possible for businesses worldwide.
Joe, a 25-year veteran at Zebra, takes us on a journey from the company's barcode origins to today's sophisticated AI implementations. He articulates how modern enterprises face critical challenges around what he calls "the three R's" – resiliency, reliability, and real-time visibility
The conversation reveals how AI is transforming frontline operations across industries. In retail, where shelf inventory accuracy typically hovers at a shocking 50-60%, AI-powered systems can now automatically identify stockouts, pricing errors, and misplaced items while generating immediate action plans. In manufacturing, companies like Bosch have reduced reject rates by 5% across 7,000 daily parts using machine vision technology. Yet Joe emphasizes that successful AI implementation requires first digitizing operational workflows – a crucial insight for any business beginning this journey.
Perhaps most compelling is Joe's customer-centric philosophy: every product in Zebra's portfolio traces back to a specific lighthouse customer who helped drive its development. This collaborative approach ensures solutions directly address real-world challenges with enterprise-grade reliability and scalability. As Joe puts it, "While I'm proud of the last 20 years of technology developed at Zebra, the next 5-10 years will be the most transformational, led by AI technologies applied to customer workflows."
Ready to see what's possible when frontline workers are truly empowered with intelligent technology? Listen now and discover how the convergence of digitization, automation, and AI is creating unprecedented opportunities for operational excellence.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, Really excited for this conversation today with Zebra Technologies around the amazing work they're doing empowering frontline workers. Joe, how are you?
Speaker 2:Hi, evan, I'm doing well, yes, doing okay. So how?
Speaker 1:are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for joining. Before we dive into the incredible work you're doing at Zebra around the role of AI and modern workflows and so much more, maybe introduce yourself, your role and team within Zebra Technologies and the mission. For those who may not be familiar, Yep, so I'm Joe White.
Speaker 2:I'm the Chief Product and Solution Officer at Zebra Technologies. I've been with the company for 25 years now, so all the way back to Matrix, which was an RFID acquisition simple technologies made into Motorola and now Zebra today. So been a long journey there and, yeah, we have a lot of exciting stuff going on around AI and digital transformation.
Speaker 1:Well, I've been a big fan of you and the team for a while and I understand the high-level strategy. How would you expand that to the current mission? What's the big idea behind not just digitizing and automating front worker activities, but leveraging AI to help them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it doesn't take long to start talking about AI anymore. It seems to be a headline for everybody. But you know, listen, our journey around helping our customers digitize and automate their operations and driving productivity isn't a new journey. We've been doing this for a long time with our customers, if you think about the legacy of Zebra and simple technologies, all the way back to printing and scanning a barcode which is really the ultimate form of providing a digital voice to physical things in the operational world that our customers operate in.
Speaker 2:And so when you think about that, that journey, and then you think about what our customers have been through over the last five years in terms of disruptions and the day to day operations of how they do business, you know I kind of qualify it as you know, the three R's, if you will. Everybody's focused around resiliency, reliability and how do I get more real-time visibility into my operations so I can respond to all the disruptions that have occurred in their real world? And so when you think about that and you combine that with the history of Zebra Technologies and the fact that we digitize and automate the frontline workers, that's what we've been about.
Speaker 1:And it's been an incredible journey. You have so much success in this market space. You know pre, during, post-pandemic lots of changes. What are some of the key drivers for adoption in the current marketplace?
Speaker 2:Well, certainly the ability to better respond to changing events in the marketplace, and in more real time. It seems like whether it's in your personal life or whether it's in your work life. As we move more to digital, the speed of the operations and the response time has to accelerate around what's going on in the marketplace. And so when you think about all the other factors, things like workforce, you know, you know, certainly during COVID, labor and shortages of labor became a big problem during the pandemic Right, but even post pandemic, if you look at, you know, the US Chamber of Commerce stats, you know there's there's eight million job openings and there's only six.8 million Americans unemployed. So the shortages around labor are going to continue to come and continue to impact growth and acceleration of our economy.
Speaker 2:But there are other factors that our customers are looking at, like worker safety, like worker job satisfaction. Job satisfaction leads to retention. How do I remove the cognitive load that my workers are under when I give them more work to do without adding additional capability and people to that operation? And that's happening across every one of the verticals we serve today.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So I like how you frame this digitization journey that's been going on for decades. But now, as these workflows are digitized, what's next? How do you really then begin to look at driving productivity and operational excellence?
Speaker 2:Well, you talked about AI and, obviously, generative AI. Agentic AI has become a headline almost in every news clip. You hear every tech speech you talk about these days. Interesting enough, my advice to all of our customers is always until you digitize your workflows, adding and investing in AI or agentic AI or generative AI becomes really, really difficult.
Speaker 2:But if you think about it, ai is not new to Zebra Technologies either. You know our machine vision. Business is built around AI. And how do I drive real-time quality inspection into manufacturing operations? That has to have, you know, five nines accuracy, otherwise you slow down a production line quality issues, which inject significant costs. So AI hasn't been a new thing for us.
Speaker 2:What is new for us and what our customers are talking about today is how do I apply generative AI or agentic AI on top of the data that I'm digitizing and automating in my operations the data that I'm digitizing and automating in my operations.
Speaker 2:You saw some of that, I think, at the National Retail Federation show we did in January, where we really had front and center on stage target standing up showing how we're using AI and generative AI to actually drive intelligence into their operations.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great example of how the cognitive load that goes on a store associate in a retail environment. When you're looking at a shelf, facing and saying what has to change about that shelf, what do I have to go do? What are the stock outs, what are the pricing labels that are incorrect, what are the misplaced items on that shelf, and you think about the worker and the size of a store like a Walmart or a Target or something like that. The cognitive load on that worker when customers are walking up and down the aisles, interrupting them, and all that kind of thing leads to very inaccurate inventory levels in their operations. Right when generative AI, ai and actually agentic AI can play a role is what if I can look at that shelf and automatically decode everything I'm looking at in real time, and not only do that decoding actually create the actionable workflows that actually fix the problems that are happening in.
Speaker 1:Sorry, we had a bit of a glitch. Can you hear me now?
Speaker 2:I can hear you.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, we had a bit of a glitch out there for a moment. I was getting some feedback. Can you hear me? Now was getting some feedback, can you hear?
Speaker 2:me now. No, I lost you I don't know why. Yeah, yeah I don't know where it's happening. I think my side should be solid. I'm not on wireless or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, let's try to continue, if you can hear me now, and we'll try to edit that part out and we'll ask that question again. So three, two. So when customers digitize their workflows.
Speaker 2:How are they using AI to really drive productivity in their operations? Yeah, evan, I think that's a great question. I think it didn't take us long to start talking about AI, which seems to be the topic du jour in every tech conference and every customer meeting I attend to. As you may know, zebra is not new to AI. We've included AI capabilities in our products for over a decade or more. Our machine vision products, as an example, do AI to actually do quality inspection and really get accurate dimensioning and accuracy in manufacturing environments, which you know they need five, nines uptime. You can't have quality of product coming out of a manufacturing line with yield losses because of defects in the manufacturing process. So we're not new to AI technology. What is new in our market, evan, is really generative AI and agentic AI, which is relatively new. You know most people don't really think about the fact that ChatGPT really only came out two and a half years ago, right, and it's creating headlines now everywhere you go. So I think generative AI becomes very interesting for our customers.
Speaker 2:Zebra ultimately provides productivity to what our customers do by digitizing and automating their workflows all the way back to the barcode days. That's what we're driving. Fundamentally is productivity. Now that customers have digitized a lot of their operations, ai can play a really strategic role in driving productivity. Ai can play a really strategic role in driving productivity. In fact, I would argue that and I tell many of my customers while I'm proud of the last 20 years of technology I've developed here within Zebra Technologies, I think the next five to 10 years will be the most transformational and it will be led by AI technologies and really applying it on those customer workflows Very exciting.
Speaker 1:You also mentioned real-time visibility as being absolutely critical for the enterprise. How do you deliver?
Speaker 2:on that promise of real-time insight, real-time asset visibility and what are some of the benefits your customers can gain today? Yeah, we do that in a number of ways. If you think about our portfolio of products, our mobile computers are increasingly being put in the hands of every worker out on the floor and that capability allows our customers to basically allocate tasks and digital services and digital capability out to the front line of where work is getting done within our customers, whether that be a T&L customer that's delivering packages, or it be a retail store associate that's servicing another customer and needs some product information or needs to educate the customer about what they're about to buy. Or you can go all the way across our portfolio and look at our machine vision, our RFID capability, which is providing real-time identification of what's happening in the environment in real time and many of our customers. Obviously, rfid has become a very hot topic and if you think about the problem statement where RFID is being applied in retail environments, it's all about how do I get real-time visibility of what inventory I have at my store and why is that important? That's important because e-commerce is driving transformational shifts in how customers buy and what they want to buy and how they shop and if they want to buy online and ship from a store, you better have the inventory on site. Otherwise your customer is not going to be happy when they don't get the product at the end of the day. Well, rfid technology is actually delivering on that vision of giving real-time inventory.
Speaker 2:If you think about how inventory operations work inside a retail environment, it's really. I ship from a DC to a store. Many of our customers still blindly receive those products at the back of the store and they only know that they have to restock that when it goes through point of sale and they say I have to reorder that product. If you think about all the things that can go wrong in that journey, there's a high likelihood it's not sitting on your shelf, it could have been stolen, it could have never actually arrived at the store. I mean, there's so many things that could go wrong. If you look at a typical retailer, evan, you'd be surprised to know their on-shelf availability of inventory sits somewhere between 50% and 60% accuracy. Wow, wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:Rfid can play huge value in closing the gap so that when you walk into a store or you shop online, you actually get the product you were looking for. We can all get behind that. So we assume, because we all have mobile phones, that frontline workers are always connected as well, which sadly isn't the case, and you know a connected frontline workforce is super essential. Now how do you see yourself empowering those frontline workers, and what does the increase in terms of productivity and operational flexibility mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a great question, evan.
Speaker 2:We are seeing a general trend, and it starts with kind of our larger customers around the world and it varies by geography, but the general trend towards giving every worker some type of connected device.
Speaker 2:So when you think about digitizing your operations, you eventually get to the point where you're really managing two different worlds an analog world where you think tasks are happening, you think things are happening in the operation, and then a digital world where you can real time see them approaching that inflection point, certainly some of the large ones where they've digitized so much of their operation that it's actually costing them more money to manage both worlds of analog and digital, if you will right. And so we see this trend of putting a device. It may not be a mobile computer, it may be a wearable computer, it may be a different form factor, but having to connect all the frontline workers so that they can really run the operation at speed will play a significant role in driving productivity is because once you've digitized that frontline, you can really get the leverage of what AI technology can bring to that.
Speaker 1:And speaking of AI, the flip side, automation super important as well, and automation techniques have become much more intelligent and yet you know, many folks have only just embarked or haven't started their automation journey. How do you see intelligent automation being adopted and what are some of the results, outcomes you're seeing at the moment?
Speaker 2:outcomes you're seeing at the moment. Yeah, I think, listen, we're. You know we've invested considerably around our machine vision business over the last five years and that tends to be the front of our intelligent automation. But certainly RFID technology plays a role in there as well. I mean really, really fundamentally, rfid is automatically collecting digital information that historically was done with a handheld barcode scanner or a mobile computer device. But certainly RFID, machine vision and robotics are all playing a role inside of our customers to really automate a lot of these workflows.
Speaker 2:And what I tell you is automation isn't replacing workers. What it's actually doing is it's augmenting the, I'd say, more laborious context work that workers were doing within their workflows, regardless of the vertical you're talking about, and putting them to more higher value add workflows where they can add value. As I mentioned earlier, the labor pool is not getting better and I don't foresee it getting better over the next 10 years and customers will have to continually look at how do I automate the context work that my workers are doing that they don't want to do? You know, machine vision is a great example of that.
Speaker 2:I mean, if we can look down a conveyor belt and actually read not only what packages are coming down the conveyance at line speed. But we can look at the condition of the package. We can look at is it a box, is it an envelope? All these things we can infer and tell. Well, those are things that people were standing there manually doing at one point in time. I mean, there's customers of ours, the automotive industry. While it's a little bit depressed today, there's customers of ours like Bosch that you know they've actually improved their reject rates by 5% on a production line volume of 7,000 parts per day. Wow, these are significant things that required a human being in the equation to actually look at the quality issues of those parts coming off the line and actually remove them out of the production.
Speaker 1:Wow, fantastic story. Love that. Final question, just on your sort of personal professional philosophy around design how do you think about aligning? You know product goals with customer needs and you know baking in reliability and productivity. You have a lot of hit products. So what's been your secret to success there in your approach to product development?
Speaker 2:Well, certainly it all starts with the customer. Evan, like you know, we are not a consumer company. We are not, you know, we're not a B2C kind of company. Our mission in life is to help drive enterprise customers and what that means is high quality, high reliability, high dependability and delivering a platform across their operations that they can scale with confidence in their environment. So the way I drive the product organization is really about customer intimacy. We don't build any products without being engaged with the customer. Literally, I can go through our portfolio and tell you every single product we have and who was the lighthouse customer who drove that product and, generally speaking, we co-design it. It's one of the gratifying things about my role at this company and why I've been here so long is I get to work with the smartest and largest customers in the world and co-develop and build and invest R&D and really incredible products that solve problems for them.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, your success is shining through. Congratulations on helping so many customers onwards and upwards. Can't wait to hear what's next. Thanks for joining Joe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me, Evan. It was great to speak with you and, yeah, we have a lot of exciting things coming, so I look forward to the future. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Can't wait. Can't wait to see more Thanks, thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.
Speaker 2:Thank.