Artificially-intelligent robots are already being used at the world’s most innovative companies. Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) has autonomous robots manufacturing its electric vehicles and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) has robots stocking the shelves of its warehouses. The implementation of robotics has allowed for incredible precision, lower costs, and overall more efficient operations.

But as complex as today’s robots are, tomorrow’s will be even more impressive. Further improvements in advanced sensors, internet and cellular connectivity, machine learning, and neural networks are providing for an entirely new class of robots. Their optimized performance and enhanced capabilities could disrupt entire industries — which goes far beyond just auto manufacturing or warehousing.

We believe forward-thinking investors should be aware of those changes. So 7investing brought in a robotics expert, to give us a glimpse of what the future could look like.

Bill Studebaker is the President and Chief Investment Officer of ROBO Global, which was the first entity to define robotics and automation as a unique and investable asset class.

Bill and the ROBO team are searching the globe to find the most innovative providers of robotic technology. They’ve compiled their favorite companies into an index, which can be invested in through the ETF with the ticker “ROBO”.

In an exclusive interview with 7investing, Bill describes the most likely opportunities where robotics will be embraced and why he uses “revenue purity” as a key metric to determine allocations. He also offers a higher-level view on the current state of artificial intelligence, and where AI-powered robots could soon become the most valuable.

Bill also shares his personal take on Tesla and explains why healthcare could soon become the most exciting opportunity for AI and robotics.

Interview timestamps:

0:00 – Introduction
0:40 – E-commerce and warehouse automation
4:48 – AI in the automotive industry and thoughts on Tesla
8:17 – “Picks and shovel” technology providers and structuring the index allocation
14:29 – Robotics, telehealth, and the healthcare industry
22:20 – What surprises you about the progress being made in AI?
29:18 – What should investors interested in robotics and AI be watching?

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Amazon, Tesla, NVIDIA, Xilinx, Microchip, Cadence, Ambarella, Moderna, Teladoc, Ping An, Livongo, Koh Young, Apple. 7investing’s advisors and/or guests may have positions in the companies that are mentioned.

This interview was originally recorded on April 8, 2020 and was first published on April 16, 2020.

Complete Transcript

[00:00:00] Simon Erickson: Hi everyone! 7investing founder Simon Erickson here. And we are talking this afternoon about robotics.

There is truly a rise of the robots across the entire world. We’re seeing robotics and automation start to change fundamentally a whole variety of different industries. And this could have some big implications for investors.

I’m joined this afternoon by Bill Studebaker. He’s the President and Chief Investment Officer of ROBO Global. ROBO Global is a financial services company that was the first entity to define robotics and automation as a unique and investable class, and has created the first index to track and monitor all companies on a global basis. Bill, thanks very much for joining me here this afternoon!

Bill Studebaker: Thanks Simon, good to be here.

[00:00:40] Simon Erickson: Bill, we’ve spoken before. And last time we spoke, you mentioned that robotics is not necessarily a niche, but a foundational technology that’s being applied across industries. So this is something that’s disrupting a whole bunch of different markets out there.

I want to talk about a couple of those markets first and then start talking a little bit higher level. But one that we’re probably all familiar with is robotics and automation for warehousing and e-commerce. And we kind of think about Amazon having these Kiva robots going through its warehouses to pick up items.

What are your expectations for e-commerce going forward? And is robotics being used in that field just the new normal, globally?

Bill Studebaker: Yeah, well, it’s a good question. When you look at e-commerce and warehouse automation technologies, they are enabling global populations to adhere to social distancing and self-isolation mandates.

And while e-commerce was probably a luxury in the past, it is now being catapulted into a new reality and a necessity. And as a result, growth in this area is only expected to accelerate.

If you’re an e-commerce retailer, it’s not about the cost of the product, it’s about the speed of fulfillment. You order from Amazon not because you want the product in a week or in days, you want it soon to be inside of hours. That only comes with automation.

And with automation, guess what comes? More demand. So Amazon and a slew of other retailers are adding significantly more people to their payrolls. A lot of temporary and probably likely to be transitioning on a full time basis, because they need them. We just don’t have enough people to do it.

So Amazon is adding one hundred thousand — and since they bought Kiva Systems in 2012-ish — they have added upwards of 175,000 people despite adding a hundred thousand robots. So robots haven’t stole our jobs. They’ve actually created more demand.

And so we think that’s the market. I mean, last year, warehouse and automation topped $53 billion dollars as a market. We think it’s going to exceed in excess of $80 billion by 2023. And the last anecdote, I would say, by 2023 it’s expected that e-commerce globally is going to be a $6.5 trillion market. So I think that’s what we’re seeing.

Simon Erickson: Yeah, Amazon has really set the bar for everyone else now too, right? The two day shipping, like you said. The benefits of Prime. If you’re *not* offering those and you’re also an e-commerce company out there, you’re kind of behind the expectation that consumers have for everyone.

Bill Studebaker: Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly right. Clearly, we’re having to see everyone step up their game. And if you’re a bricks and mortar retailer, you have to use A.I. to optimize or manage your business better. So let’s just say you’re a retailer in Santa Monica and it’s 80 degrees and you’re selling bathing suits. Is it better to sell your bathing suit at $59.99 or $29.99? Recognizing what the weather patterns are like. Should I have more SKUs or less SKUs? Only AI can kind of optimize this by understanding the SKUs that you have, the weather patterns, past purchasing behavior, and things to help optimize.

So really, robotics and A.I. are tools to help improve productivity and optimize your cost structure and find new ways of growth. I mean, if we’re going to come out of this enormous economic distraction that we’re in right now, we’re going to need these tools to help manage our business and our lives.

[00:04:48] Simon Erickson: And allow me to shift gears here for a minute, Bill — and pardon the pun on this one — but let’s talk about the automotive industry. You know, this is an industry that’s traditionally been a little bit more incremental, a little bit more conservative. You know, high focus on models and brands and safety, and things like that.

And then we’ve got companies like Tesla that are using the car as a vehicle for software. They’re trying to automate, of course, as much of that as possible through autonomous driving.

Two questions for you. First of all, is ROBO Global investing in the automotive space? And two, what are your thoughts on Elon Musk and Tesla?

Bill Studebaker: Well, I guess the first question, we’re not investing directly in the auto industry. But we’re investing in technologies that will enable autonomous vehicle development.

So Computing Processing A.I. are 22% of our index. So we’re investing in companies again, that are enabling this. So companies like NVIDIA that you all are aware of. Companies like Xilinx and Microchip. And chip design companies like Cadence and lesser known companies like Ambarella — that is in a video processing that’s slowly moving into computer vision technologies for the auto industry. There is actually a pretty big ecosystem of companies that are enabling that to happen.

But auto is the largest utilizer of factory automation. If you look at the penetration rate globally, it’s around 40-45 percent penetrated. So still obviously not 100 percent penetrated. And that is a big end market.

So for us, it’s roughly around 35 percent of our factory automation exposure comes from auto. And with auto being down, that’s a little bit of a headwind that we have to absorb.

But fortunately, if you look at consumer electronics, which is the second biggest category of factory automation, that is on fire. So we’re having to live at home and we have to deal with improving our mobility. So people are having to upgrade and buy new computers and different electronics. They’ll enable their lives. So that business has actually picked up and we sort of see that almost equalizing itself. So we think there’s still a lot of growth in the years to come.

In terms of Tesla: It’s only my personal opinion because we’re not invested in Tesla. But they do have a moat around their business and having a first mover advantage in this technology and they are generating a tremendous amount of data. And you really can’t count Elon Musk out. He’s a tremendous visionary.

But I do have a little bit of reservations in that the auto industry collectively is investing somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 billion in E.V. Technologies. And at the end of the day, I’m not sure if people are going to really value this as an auto company or if they’re going to value it as a “technology company” — as you talked about. I guess, you know, time will tell.

I would say that at this price, I think the-risk reward is probably somewhat evenly balanced. Not to suggest that there is exponential downside. But there’s been a lot of good news priced in stock. I think. That’s my personal opinion.

[00:08:17] Simon Erickson: Makes sense. I’m glad you mentioned the index a little bit. And some of those components of the index. Companies like NVIDIA and Xilinx. Those are familiar to investors because they’ve been phenomenal investments. They’ve been phenomenal stocks for investors to buy and hold for years now.

And we kind of think of those – sometimes we kind of call those the “picks and shovels” – the technology providers that others are actually adopting.

In looking through the index that you’ve created, Bill, I’ve seen a lot of others that are less familiar names. Especially internationally, you know, these same types of technology providers that are serving other industries.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you create the index? How you pick companies that go into it? How you figure out the allocations? And kind of what you look for, when you’re picking the components for this?

Bill Studebaker: So first and foremost, we were the first company ever to have created an index that tracks what we believe was the inevitable growth in robotics and AI. So think back seven years ago. It didn’t exist. We wanted to invest in robots and AI. But there weren’t any dedicated mutual funds doing this, hedge funds, etc. So we actually had to create kind of an S&P or MSCI for that.

So we either define a company as a “technology” or an “application”. So what makes the technology work? That’s the computing. The A.I. The processing. Sensing, actuation, integration.

And the use case is where is the robotics being deployed? Well, into everywhere from industrial manufacturing, as we know about. Into warehouse automation, into healthcare, ag, food, security and surveillance, consumer energy. And it’s growing as the use cases are growing.

So to get in the index, a company has to fit within one of our eleven sectors. And then we’re looking for companies that have high revenue purity. We actually only have two position weights. It’s a revenue-weighted index, very different than most traditional indices which are market cap weighted. And that tends – being market cap weighted – you tend to invest in yesterday’s winners. Whereas we’re trying to invest in tomorrow’s winners.

So we have two position weights. We have what we call pure play technology companies — we call them bellwethers — that’s 40 percent of the portfolio has a 2 percent weight. The other 60 percent are emerging technologies we call non bellweather. That each has a 1 percent weight. And we rebalance quarterly to smooth out the ride.

Again, we’re looking for companies that have high revenue purity. I’m agnostic to where the company is based. Whether it’s in the US or Germany or Korea or Japan, etc. We’re trying to find the companies that have the high revenue purity. And then also, we think have very strong technological leadership. Man, I wish there was an AI button that I could hit and have a computer just tell me, you know, what’s the guaranteed or better company to invest in. We do a lot of rigorous fundamental analysis. And we employ 7 PhD’s on our team — that you know some about, Simon – and hopefully your viewers can take a look at our web sites Roboglobal.com to get insight on our team. But our 7 PhDs really helped create the industry. They’ve built technologies there. They are key confidants to CEOs globally and amazing entrepreneurs.

And I think these people give us, along with our own research, tremendous insight into where where the world’s going.

So right now, as it stands, roughly 45% of our index is North America and 55% is international. Again, not by design. This is bottoms up. Having to do with where the technology comes from. And this is very much a global phenomenon. So to get access to this, you really want to play it globally and not try to pick the sectors or the geographies or even right now, the obvious, you know, companies that might be what you believe are the obvious winners. So we think this is a better risk adjusted way to extract that.

Simon Erickson: Yeah. And you said you’re agnostic to location of the companies. You’re looking for revenue growth — was that what it was, that you’re determining for the allocations?

Bill Studebaker: We’re looking for companies that have high revenue purity. I mean, that’s important to us.

And, you know, we’re very prudent about the valuation, too. If you look at the median P/E of our companies on a trailing 12 month basis, our index trades around 19 to 20 times earnings. Versus the historical, which is around twenty four times. Again, this is earnings, not revenues. And for those that are are heavily invested in technology, it’s nice to hear the word “earnings”, because a lot of companies are valued, you know, on revenues.

So I think there’s a good amount of cushion, not to mention 60% of our index has a net cash position and no debt. And we think that is a really important asset as we’re entering this new sort of market cycle. Companies that need cash are going to be in trouble. There’s going to be a lot of companies that are going to go out of business. They’re goign to need government support. If you invest in companies that are getting government support, I think you’re going to find that might be a difficult experience as as an equity owner going forward. Because there’s going to be a lot of shackles on those companies in terms of their ability to buy back stock, what they can do in terms of pricing and margins. And so I would just be cognizant of that.

The S&P, as an example, has roughly about 14% of the constituents have a net cash position. So, again, that compares to ours at 60. And our health care index, it’s also a similar level of cash too. Roughly around 60% as well. So well-positioned to weather the storm.

[00:14:29] Simon Erickson: Yeah, sounds like a nice balance of getting the revenue growth and the upside, but also being conservative too and responsible. Looking for companies with a net cash position and with earnings.

Let’s talk about that health care index a little bit. Bill, we’ve talked before about robotic surgery. We’re familiar with companies like Intuitive Surgical. We’re starting to see a new movement towards telehealth where you can do consultations with doctors from your home rather than going to the hospital.

What are the things that are getting you excited about the health care industry right now?

Bill Studebaker: Health care might be the most exciting area that robotics and AI is going to change. If you think about health care, 20% of our GDP is spent on health care. That’s unsustainable. It’s actually not health care. It’s sick care. And this is happening really globally.

So this is an industry that’s going to go through an enormous wave of digitization. Going from an analog industry to digital. And this again, this is going to happen globally. And I think if you look at people that are born now, kids now will not live until they’re 60 or 70 — try 100, try 120+ [years old]. Why? Because we’ve got the ability to not just arrest the signs of aging, but in many cases begin to reverse it. And you look at most health care funds or indices, they tend to look at health care as treating something after it happens. Right. So you go and get a disease. So let’s just try to go and stop it or arrest it. But wouldn’t it be better to predict it and prevent it? Right.

So we’re looking at investing in the future of health care. Which is everything from diagnostics to robotics to process automation to genomics to telehealth. To precision medicine, data analytics, and regenerative medicine. This is the future of health care.

If you look at the S&P health care index as an example, we would only have around 30 percent overlap with that index. So many of our companies are not in know most global indices. I think we’re gonna have tremendous growth.

I think there’s going to be trillions of dollars of economic value that are going to be up for grabs in the years ahead as we begin to cut costs, manage illness, eliminate illness. You see it already right now that as a result of, you know, the virus, A.I. has been on the ground floor helping to guess what — sequence the coronavirus to be able to figure out where it’s come from. You can’t do anything unless you can sequence that and you can understand it to then be able to develop therapies.

Companies like Moderna that some of your listeners may have heard about, it’s an amazing company that was the first company to begin human trials for a new drug or therapy after only 42 days.

Simon Erickson: Amazing.

Bill Studebaker: That would have been unheard of years ago. And so they have 11 programs in clinical trials and a total of 20 development candidates. So it’s not a one trick pony. They just happened to be first to the show.

And so, you know, regenerative medicine is really exciting. Genomics is really exciting. There’s other companies that are doing telehealth. A lot of your listeners or subscribers would know about Teladoc. Teladoc has gone from basically the outhouse to the penthouse in literally a couple of weeks as a result of the pandemic. I mean, telemedicine has exploded in its use and applications.

It took Teladoc 10 years to get to a million virtual care visits. Last quarter alone, they had a million virtual care visits. I’ll be interested to see what their virtual care visits are in the upcoming quarter, as of — I think it was March 12th — we had a look at what their business was doing. And their televisits were up 50% on a year over year basis.

There are other companies, globally who are doing this. We have another company in our health care index, HTEC, which you can look at. It’s on the NYSE. Ping An is based in Hong Kong. It is a Chinese company that was spun-out of an insurance company: “Ping An Health and Technology”. And Simon, this is a company that does 650,000 virtual care visits per day!

Not per week. Not per quarter. Not per year. Per day. Ping An is going to do 250 million virtual care visits per year.

So if I had to guess, in three to five years, telehealth will be upwards of serving a billion virtual care visits per day.

So as a result of the pandemic, we’re institutionalizing new business ways that you could have never predicted. New businesses are emerging almost overnight as a result of this pandemic. The shift to more mobility is happening.

And so, when you look at companies that are doing monitoring. We have another company in our index called Livongo. They provide A.I. driven solutions to employees to help them manage chronic illness. And their flagship service provides people with diabetes with everything they need from strips to live consultants. And they’ve expanded into other therapeutic area.

So there’s going to be a lot more monitoring. And this is all happening because performance capabilities of computing have skyrocketed. And the costs of computing have plummeted.

This has created an array of use cases that a couple of years ago was “Elon Musk Science Fiction.” So I think that as well as there are people that have that have doom and gloom…

[Bill’s phone rings, which temporarily interrupts the conversation].

Again, I just think that we’re in these early days. And there is a lot of stress in the market.

And robotics and A.I., years ago, might not have been an investable theme 6, 7, 8 years ago. Robotics and A.I. Is a an immensely important industry to track and follow. And I think this is the future of where the world’s going. And I think if you’re investing in the past, that’s investing in the zombies. I think you want to be investing in the future, which is investing in the robots.

And Sundar Pichai sort of categorically talked about it in his conference call last quarter. Where he talked about A.I. being the most important technology of our lifetime. And so, I think if you look at the FANG companies, they’re all embracing these technologies and using them to help manage their business. And they’re doing it better than than 99 percent of other companies.

[00:22:20] Simon Erickson: It’s an interesting thing to think about, Bill. Because, you know, you mentioned Sundar. But then you also think about Sergei Brin. Co-founder of Google, who spoke to the World Economic Forum and said that he missed how fast A.I. was going to happen. The co-founder of Google going out there and saying that it surprised him how quickly things picked up out there.

What is it, in everything that you see with A.I. and robotics and everything that you look at on a daily basis? What is it that surprises you right now in the progress that’s being made in A.I.?

Bill Studebaker: Well, I think, first of all, the important thing to recognize about A.I.: it’s about optimizing. The notion of General A.I. that Elon Musk talks about. Robots stealing our jobs and taking us and being able to do everything is, in my personal opinion, nonsense.

A.I. is trying to attack and automate a specific task. And so I think we shouldn’t lose focus on that. That’s actually what’s happening. Because, when you think about A.I., AI development is always based on learning and data. And the A.I. system has learned from prior experience by humans and machines. Therefore, it’s good at mimicking good decision making. But it doesn’t always demonstrate innovation. So, you know, put it in front of a new situation and it’s missing human intuition. So humans have this ability to do lateral thinking and then apply their wisdom and intuition to a whole new situation.

So I think we need to think about that. And within every AI application, it’s attacking a different problem. It’s also attacking a different industry. The A.I. solution that you’re applying at a certain company, health care, may be focused on trying to cut costs. And another one might be trying to optimize, you know, growth. Another one could be used to help improve quality assurance. There’s just a lot of things that AI can do better than people.

Imagine, we have a company in our index called Koh Young. They have an amazing 3-D sensing technology. So imagine you have a cell phone going down a production line. OK. And that goes out. If you look you have a human being looking at the circuit board, you’re probably going to have a difficult time understanding “is that a well-manufactured, assembled board?”. So in this case, Koh Young, does 3D imaging where it looks at hundreds of images, thousands of images of a perfect assembled circuit boards. So when it comes out, it’s perfectly assembled. The last thing Apple wants is to have a phone come back to you with a disgruntled purchaser that bought a product that doesn’t work.

And so there are many cases where A.I. is now going to be rolled out to all parts of manufacturing for quality assurance. And in many cases, robotics and A.I. can do it faster than people. And that doesn’t mean replace every everyone. It just means for optimizing. And I know that we’re all worried about, you know, job losses and things like that. The fact of the matter is that some of the jobs should be automated. When you look at the apple picker as an example, it’s not a very glorified job. I don’t think many of us wake up or graduate college and say, “I’m going to go pick apples for a living.”

The fact of the matter is an apple, it takes a person roughly seven to eight seconds to pick an apple. Whereas a robot can do it inside of a second. And it also can do it by looking using A.I. to help determine, “is that apple ripe?” And it can look at this and tell this 24/7/365 days a year. In the sun or in the dark. And so, again, it’s really about optimizing.

Simon Erickson: Bill, with everything that you’re seeing: we talked about health care, we talked about optimizing, we talked about apple picking, automation, automotive, everything that you look at. And I know you’ve been doing this for at least a decade — looking at robotics and A.I. out there.

Are there pockets of where you see the progress being made right now in A.I. that just surprises you? That you just think that you’ve hit that inflection point? Of things really happening really quickly right now – that’s really, really catching your interest? Is there anything like that standing out on your radar?

Bill Studebaker: Well, it’s kind of touching all areas again. If you look at the industries that are exploding, it’s happening in warehouse automation. There is going to be a massive array of new bin-picking technologies there to come out.

I mean, humans are good at doing unstructured work. Robots have not been very good at doing unstructured work. And so there’s a lot of new grasping technologies that are coming out.

When you look at in health care, it’s robotics A.I. helping work alongside of doctors to make better decisions. So it’s all about eliminating a doctor. It’s about helping augment their decision making. And when you look at an oncologist that might see hundreds of MRIs a day. They have a certain capacity of the number of MRIs that they could see or x-rays. Well, a robot or AI can see hundreds and thousands of those a day. And so we’re not capacity constrained. A robot or A.I. is good at looking at hundreds and thousands, maybe millions of images of what might be a a malignant cancer cell or a benign and being able to tell that. And to be able to work alongside a doctor to come to good clinical decisions. I don’t think any of us want a “A.I.” or a robot making decisions for us. You know, we want that done in consultation with a doctor.

So, again, I just think that we’re in such early use cases of this and this is going to go on for years, if not really decades and centuries. We’re at the forefront of one of the greatest technological shifts that humanity has ever seen. Obviously, it’s been a little bit obfuscated by what’s going on because of the economic considerations with the virus, which obviously are important and take precedent. But these are the technologies that are going to help us get out of this.

[00:29:18] Simon Erickson: And one final question for you. Our viewers here at 7investing are individual investors. We’re very interested in robotics and A.I.

What are a couple of things that you think that we should be keeping an eye on? Is it processor power? Is it the reduction in costs of robots?

What are some of the things that you look at, to determine how things are really going out there in the robotics and A.I. field?

Bill Studebaker: Well, I think that’s it. I mean, what’s important for a lot of your viewers to appreciate is that when you think back to seven, eight, nine, 10, 15, 20 years ago — robotics and AI have been around. But what happened historically was that people would work on technology. And let’s say that you were at Stanford and got one hundred thousand dollars for a robot to clean your table. Well, it would probably start working on it. And guess what would happen? They would run out of money. So all the technology that was learned basically collapsed and it never scaled. And now with open architecture and let you use it like robot operating systems, this is shared knowledge. So it’s very easy for people to now start up technologies. And so the growth is really not linear anymore. It’s becoming exponential. So, you know, we’re doubling our processing power or computing every 18 months. And our cost of computing is plummeting. So again, we’re institutionalizing new ways of working.

And I think, you know, this crisis is going to kind of help prioritize tomorrow’s tech transformation. So we know that we’ve already accelerate the need for network capacity and bandwidth. So the shift to remote work, doing virtual classes and video conferencing, is only increased demand for a greater capacity. And the move to 5G. So I think your viewers should be very focused and your subscribers that we’re going to see even a stronger shift into 5G. And cloud providers and infrastructure companies that enable A.I. and advanced analytics are seeing a notable increase in demand for data center buildouts. So datacenter buildouts, you know, are going to continue to happen.

And so that would be a couple of things I would kind of watch. I wouldn’t expect to see autonomous vehicles happen next week. So I think really what the forefront of where we are is really, again, warehouse automation, health care technologies are taking center stage right now. And I would be very focused on those areas.

Simon Erickson: Well once again, Bill Studebaker is the President and Chief Investment Officer of ROBO Global. He is structuring the indexes behind two publicly tradable ETFs. One is “R-O-B-O”, that’s Robo, which is focusing on robotics. Another one focusing on health care, “H-T-E-C”. They’ve also got a third one available internationally that focuses on artificial intelligence.

Bill, thanks very much for the time with 7investing this afternoon!

Bill Studebaker: Thanks Simon! Good to be here.

Simon Erickson: And we are here empowering you to invest in your future. We are 7investing!

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