A World Set for Greater Levels of Automation - Britbots

As the world begins to rebuild beyond the Pandemic, it is becoming more-and-more likely that the forthcoming years will be shaped by increasingly sophisticated robotics and AI technologies. Minimum wages remain high in the Western world even with current low levels of employment and robotic platforms, now acting with greater levels of autonomy and precision, are increasingly making inroads into those activities which previously have required high levels of manual labour and to-date have somewhat avoided the digital revolution.

Despite the challenges of lockdowns, UK-based robotics businesses seem to have been creative in maintaining the pace of their product development. More challenging has been companies’ abilities to find new customers and deploy their technology, either as proofs-of-concept or full implementations. We hope to see the conditions for selling improve over the forthcoming months as corporations realise the importance of delivering productivity gains as a means of flourishing in the post-Pandemic economy. In recent economic cycles, businesses have tended to double-down their spending on automation following a recession, rather than re-hiring staff to previous levels.

“Old-economy” sectors including construction, agriculture, energy, mining, heavy industry, logistics and security are all particularly ripe for a step-up in productivity as their “physicality” has meant that they’ve often stayed less automated than other parts of the economy such as financial services, retail or even high-volume manufacturing. 

 Take construction as an example: with a value chain delivering approximately £10 trillion of global value​, it represents approximately 13 percent of global GDP. Nonetheless, there is a huge productivity problem. The construction sector has seen meagre productivity growth of one percent annually for the past two decades. Ultimately, the value-add in construction comes from creating physical structures and installing the fixtures, fittings and decorations that allow buildings to be useful spaces for life and work.  Whilst there is a great deal of technology and advanced machinery used, it all requires a high level of human oversight and intervention. We are only now reaching tipping point in robotics whereby the practical implementation of effective, reliable autonomous systems is making substantial productivity gains in this area possible.

This theme of delivering greater levels of autonomy within the physical economy represents a rich seem for companies, like those in Britbots' portfolio to exploit. 

Britbots is a specialist UK based pre-seed an investment fund, investing in 10 new pre-seed companies per year. We invest in companies using artificial intelligence, robotics or other automation technologies to develop productivity gains and are typically the first external investor into a business.

If you are an entrepreneur looking for pre-seed or seed investment in the automation, artificial intelligence or robotics space please email alex@britbots.com