Mike Melanin (CEO at nopilot.ai) training robot for the follow-me use case.

Let’s talk e-commerce first. We are accustomed to thinking of e-commerce as something that appeared at the dawn of the Internet, then experienced rapid growth during the advent of Web 2.0 and became firmly established in our lives. All big players like Amazon, Alibaba, and JD have eaten e-comm market and innovations are rare or redundant. What surprised me is that e-commerce is still only a small fraction of retail spending. It takes only 10% worldwide with projected YoY growth 2% over the next decade. We will see how many untouched areas of retail will be drastically transformed by new technologies.

Surely enough, there is always a catch. As Benedict Evans emphasizes in his talk at Andreessen Horowitz Summit last November the era of simple tools for low touch goods has passed. Explicit examples include airplane ticket aggregators, restaurant review sites. Now we face the need for full stack solutions where the information is used as a system rather than arbitrage. Those kinds of solutions require a lot more investments compared to services developed over the last 20 years. Another good example taken from Benedict’s talk is Yelp vs. DoorDash. We used to do restaurant reviews and now you can get a hot meal delivered to your door in less than 30-minutes. The same goes for apartment listings. Now with Opendoor, you can buy a home.

The rapid growth in e-commerce caused a surge in demand for delivery, particularly its most expensive part — the point at which the package arrives at the buyer’s door, or so-called last-mile delivery. The Internet made us accustomed to instant services. We are keen on two-day delivery, same-day delivery, and in some cases — instant delivery. However, we are not ready to pay a premium for FMCG and restaurants delivery, McKinsey study said.

Many startups and incumbents are aware of this opportunity and are trying to respond to this market needs using autonomous ground robots. A tsunami of great promise and huge investments in automotive self-driving was followed by a wave of interest in smaller unmanned ground vehicles.