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How Serve Robotics delivers your food via robot

Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani joins Yahoo Finance to discuss his company's plans for growth the automated delivery business.

Video Transcript

- Delivering robots. They actually might be here. Uber Eats reaching a deal with Serve Robotics. Now they're going to use their robots to deliver food to their Uber Eats customers starting in LA next year. Let's bring in Ali Kashani. He's the CEO of Serve Robotics also the former head of Postmates X at Uber.

Ali, it's great to see you. Congratulations. We know that this deal is huge here for your business going forward. But talk to us just about how this partnership with Uber, how this is going to change the future of delivery as we know it.

ALI KASHANI: Thank you for having me. Really appreciate the time. You know when you actually look at how delivery works today, we are moving two pound burritos in two ton cars. And that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's incredibly inefficient.

What robots are going to do, they're going to solve a number of problems. They're going to help us make delivery more efficient, more cost effective, and also more sustainable. So you are experiencing labor shortage right now. It's a known thing. It's always been an issue.

But robots are kind of stepping in to help with that. At the same time by removing cars off the street they can also make cities less congested and also reduce carbon emissions.

- Ali, just got to tell you, there's some restaurants where that two pound burrito, after you eat it, feels like you just ate a two ton car. But I want to-- these robots are so cool. And in New York and in major cities, you know we depend upon, and God bless the men and women who are on those delivery scooters and bikes, bringing stuff to us. But

They run the red lights. It's a hazard for a lot of people. There are accidents all the time. In fact, there was just one tragically, the other day here in New York City. These robots, how do they know when to stop at the intersection and then to go?

ALI KASHANI: There's a lot of smarts in there. So we've actually spent the last four years just developing the right robot. You have the same kind of sensors that you have on self-driving cars, the same kind of computational power and AI insight.

So it can look at signs. It can recognize signals. It can recognize other road users and make sure that it's safe. There are multiple levels of safety. We have the AI that's inside the machine. And there are also people that can remotely help a robot that is confused at any point. So the redundancy is really the answer.

- Ali, when it comes to Serve's future vision for the company, I guess, what percentage of deliveries do you see robots accounting for?

ALI KASHANI: You know, our goal is actually to take 5% of all food deliveries off the road in the next five years that would be to give you a sense equivalent to about 100,000 vehicles being eliminated in the US alone. We were just talking about DoorDash. And you know, they're making an $8 billion play today to expand worldwide. But it would seem to me they could view you as a threat or they could view you as a partner? Are you talking to other firms that deliver about using your product?

ALI KASHANI: Yeah, this was the reason we spun out of Uber because we wanted to be able to partner with more folks and actually offer our service to others. So we are talking to other platforms. We are talking to retailers and restaurants. So hopefully there would be more announcements on that front. But this was really the reason why we wanted to be an independent company.

- Ali, that's interesting because right now you're focusing on moving food. And you mentioned retailers there. But I guess what's next? What else can you serve? What other industries could you potentially collaborate with?

ALI KASHANI: I mean, if you think about broader picture of on-demand delivery, we want everything right away. And this is going to be grocery, this is going to be your convenience items, alcohol, I mean, cannabis, just name it, everything. But there are a lot of interesting applications here.

One really kind of favorite example of mine is I recently bought some shoes from Amazon. Took two days for it to come. It was a wrong size. I had to pack it put it back in to a package and send it back and then wait for the next one. But with robots, you can actually buy those shoes from a local store, support your local businesses.

It would show up in three sizes. You would try them on keep the one that actually fit, put the other two back into the robot and send it back. So there are a lot of interesting ways this is going to change the experience for the consumers and probably new applications that would be built on top of this. Because it's really going to be a new kind of infrastructure for cities to do local deliveries, bring down the cost of transaction for local businesses and also make local delivery more affordable and more sustainable.

- Plus you wouldn't have to worry about the labor shortage, hiring the delivery driver. And just for the record, you had me at the two pound burrito. But when you look at these robots, do you have to go through regulatory hurdles?

For instance, you talk a lot about drone delivery, different kind of regulations. Are there regulations right now in place in cities like LA, where you are going to roll this out. And then when you come to New York or can you just hit the street and run?

ALI KASHANI: Actually, we have a lot of strong support on the regulation side. And I think the reason for that is that it aligns really well with the objectives of the regulators, like cities or states. Everybody wants to reduce dependency on cars. They want to improve congestion issues and parking issues and accidents.

They also want to reduce carbon emissions. And they want to boost the local economy. And these are all the things that we can actually help with. So as a result of that, we are seeing a lot of traction. There are 16 states that have already put frameworks in place for sidewalk robots.

And the fact is that even places without a framework, robots are not kind of banned by default. They're actually allowed to operate. But we like to engage ahead of time before we roll out robots to any city and kind of create that alignment.

- Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve Robotics, really, really cool product. I've been blown away by the videos that we've been showing during this segment. We wish you all the best. And we look forward to having you back again soon.

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