One of the most well-known employees at the Orchard Supply Hardware store in downtown San Jose, California, is a 5-foot-tall autonomous robot. OSHbot , as he’s called, just recently celebrated his one-year anniversary at the store, which is owned by Lowe’s. His job is twofold: to help customers find items they need, and help store managers with inventory tracking. When I approached OSHbot, his facial-recognition technology identified me as a human customer and he cordially introduced himself. “Hi, I’m OSHbot,” he said in a monotone voice. “I can help you find things in the store. What are you looking for?”

Technically I wasn’t looking for anything, but for the sake of research, I made something up. “LED lights,” I declared. On a screen, a list of LED bulbs appeared. I scanned and picked one at random. A map of the store appeared on the screen, with a green dot indicating our current location, and a red dot suggesting the lightbulb I’d chosen was across the store. “Would you like me to take you to the LED?” the robot asked, pronouncing “LED” like the stuff you’d find in a pencil. I pressed yes. “Sure, follow me,” he said, before rolling away with me in tow.

The bot uses the same navigational technology found in driverless cars to look for obstacles. It swerved around product displays and customers on its quest to find my item. After about a minute, the robot came to an abrupt stop in front of a wall of LED lights. “We are here,” he said. “Boom,” said Kyle Nel, the executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs and the brains behind OSHbot. He’s a young man with a full beard and a mop of slicked-back brown hair. Thick-rimmed glasses complete the nerdy hipster look. Nel has a background in applied neuroscience and has been tasked with transforming the world’s second-largest hardware chain from that place your dad goes to buy power tools, to a hotbed for retail innovation that brings science fiction to life.

Kyle Nel

“People ask me, ‘Why do you work for Lowe’s?’’ Nel says. “One of my metrics of success is how often people go, ‘Robots at Lowe’s? What?’ We’re really good at retail and understanding home improvement, which means we understand how people live in their homes. Why can’t we also continue to iterate and innovate in uncharted ways?”

At Lowe’s, Nel basically gets to experiment and play however he wants. For example, a few years ago, he invited a group of science fiction writers to create stories about the future of retail based on Lowe’s research and trend data. OSHbot was one idea they came up with. Nel, a self-proclaimed comic nerd, had the stories turned into comic books, which he gave to his team members along with a mission: Get this built. Within eight months, OSHbot was on the floor of the Orchard Supply store.

“On the outside, the whole thing might seem like a gimmick,” Nel admits. “But we didn’t build robots for the sake of building robots.” Indeed, the robot does things human employees can’t. For example, it is multilingual. So far, OSHbot is fluent in English, Spanish, and five different Asian languages. “Our research showed language was a huge pain point for customers,” Nel says. “Knowing you can walk up to a robot and communicate with it and you know it’s going to speak Japanese or Mandarin is a big deal.”

Knowing you can walk up to a robot and communicate with it and you know it’s going to speak Japanese or Mandarin is a big deal.

The robot also tracks inventory in real time and can tell employees when an item is out of stock, misplaced, or has possibly been stolen. “The real-time inventory thing in retail is like the holy grail,” Nel says. “Right now, inventory tracking at all retailers is a very tedious and very time consuming and inaccurate process, so we’re trying to attack that.” Soon, OSHbot will be able to scan items customers bring in and tell them what it is and whether the store stocks it.