Episode Details

Connect with Gil Mayron:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilmayron/

Website: https://cobotnation.com/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. Our guest today is Gil Mayron. Gil is the founder and CEO of Cobot Nation, Architects of Automation. Before Cobot, Gil was a pioneer of the consumer 3D printing industry, as the founder and CEO of Botmill 3D, which manufactured and sold the first fully assembled desktop 3D printers. 3D Systems Corp acquired Botmill. He resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife and two children. Gil, welcome to the show.

Gil Mayron: Thank you.

Lisa Ryan: So share with us your background and what led you to everything you're doing in robotics and automation.

Gil Mayron: I started in 3D printing. 3D printing is inherently slow, so there are only so many things that you can do to speed up the printing process when usually they use lasers, plastic filament, or some other method. But most of the time, it's going either point by point or layer by layer, so the only way that you can speed up 3D printing is typically through something like automation. We recognized early on that automation was in the same phase as 3D printing.  

When I sold the company back in 2011, very few companies took it on the consumer level. The industrial patents are starting to expire, and it makes sense that the adoption is coming around now, especially since you have code.

Lisa Ryan: That has changed the industrial landscape, hasn't it?

Gil Mayron: My background in 3D printing led me to do automation and robotics; it's a very similar type of process when it comes to sales and other things like that. The only difference over here is that we deal with customers directly. We're not making a product that we're selling as a commodity; we are making a highly customizable product to the customers' needs. We do something very few do.

What led me over to robotics is that 3D printing is slow. It's inherently slow, and the way that you can speed it up is through automation. So automating little tiny tasks between the more significant tasks, and in automation, especially in industrial robots. We saw the same scenario in 3D printing in 2008, 2009, and 2010 which led me to sell the company in 2011. The industrial companies, so all the large industrial robotic arms, are incredibly high priced. It isn't easy to integrate within your company, so we saw that the opportunity was virtually identical to what we saw in 3D printing.

Lisa Ryan: Oh wow. What do you think when it comes to robotics? We've been talking a lot about automation and the need for automation, but what role do you think robotics plays as far as the future of manufacturing.

Gil Mayron: The role that robotics plays in the future of manufacturing is probably upwards of 95% or more within the actual processes being done. Our engineers go out to facilities daily. It's incredible how many facilities that we go to, which are some of the largest names in the world, and they have no automation or the automation that they think they have is not automation. It's not helping up the flow of what they're doing. All of the repetitive tasks; all the things where you have humans that could be sitting on the floor sitting on a chair; they're doing something for a few hours at a time, because their safety reasons, or they physically get tired. Those are all things that are going to get replaced. Those are all things that we can easily have robots do. Those are things that are happening right now. You'll probably see a massive transition happen for the next 12 to 24 months, especially considering that our customers were saying that they're having problems hiring labor, so not only are they automating, but they're having problems hiring