The democratization and the future of the robotics industry: An interview with Ujjwal Kumar, group president of Teradyne Robotics

Ujjwal Kumar, group president of Teradyne Robotics, sits down with Heidrick & Struggles’ Jerry Gorss to discuss the changing status quo of the industrial robotics sector and manufacturing generally. Kumar shares his outlook on how the next 12 months will impact the industry, particularly its leadership needs. He also shares what he believes are the key characteristics a successful robotics and automation leader of the future must have, how he thinks about the balance on his teams between specific areas of expertise versus general all-around performers, and how AI and software expertise affects his overall talent strategy.

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services. Diversity and inclusion, leading through tumultuous times, and building thriving teams and organizations are among the core issues we talk with leaders about every day, including in our podcasts. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Jerry Gorss: Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. I'm Jerry Gorss, principal at Heidrick & Struggles’ Boston office and a member of the Global Industrial Tech practice. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Ujjwal Kumar, the group president of Teradyne Robotics and Advanced Robotics Platform, which includes universal robots and mobile industrial robots businesses.

Teradyne Robotics is a global market leader of human-scale collaborative and autonomous mobile robots, designed to work alongside people doing tasks that are dull, dirty, and even dangerous. Ujjwal has a 25-plus year proven track record of scaling businesses across multiple industrial end markets. He has distinguished experience in automation and in industrial software, coupled with broad experience with best-in-class diversified industrial manufacturing companies, including General Motors, General Electric, and most recently Honeywell.

At Teradyne, Ujjwal and his team are on a mission to transform and reinvent the industrial manufacturing space through the use of robotics. Ujjwal, welcome and thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. 

Ujjwal Kumar: Thank you, Jerry, and I appreciate that overview. 

Jerry Gorss: You recently wrote an article for Forbes that is getting a lot of attention that the status quo of the industrial robotics sector has been turned on its head, that manufacturing is being democratized like never before. Share what you mean and the dynamics at play here. 

Ujjwal Kumar: So, as I shared, my entire career has been with what you would call large industrial, from GM to GE to Honeywell. We grew up with this whole philosophy of economies of scale, where you are a large manufacturer with repeatable volume, which gives you huge economies of scale.

And when these new technologies came in, like industrial robots or Lean Six Sigma, or when people started moving a bunch of jobs to offshore locations, each of those tools made those large manufacturers even larger. All those tools were meant to improve competitiveness for the large manufacturers.

Now what you’ve seen in last 10 years is that there has been lot of variation going on in the product lines. The shelf life of those products has gone down drastically. You have your iPhone 7 but you want an iPhone 8 or 9 immediately after that. Every car company has a new model coming up every year. 

That whole economy of scale, as we knew it in the large industrial world, is gone now. The amount of variability you have on the manufacturing floor are traditional tools with which we played, which were all around economies of scale. It's gone. 

So, the problem of the large industrial is now the same as what the medium and small manufacturers have lived with for a long time, which is: how do you drive productivity in a high variability work environment? We are also struck right now with labor shortages. We have an aging workforce; birth rates are at an historic low for several economies of the world. So, this labor shortage is not going away.

This labor shortage came at a point when large manufacturers—and small and medium manufacturers—are trying to attract talent to handle this variability. This is a huge transformation going on in the industrial world, which I've grown up with for more than two decades. 

Jerry Gorss: It's a very exciting and dynamic time. Specific to reshoring, what's your outlook for the next 12–24 months and how will it impact the robotics industry, considering large geopolitical events that are currently ongoing around the world? 

Ujjwal Kumar: I was in China a few weeks back. That China this time felt very different than the China I went to just two years back, and I've been visiting every year for the last 20 years.

You have a huge exodus of manufacturing moving out of China. That is lot of reshoring and nearshoring going on. And in China, as you move around through the factories, you will see a lot more robots, not just industrial robots but collaborative robots doing the work which was done by humans in the past. 

Now, when I look at any work—which, say, I'm doing at a factory in Shenzhen versus doing it in Chicago—if I'm using robots to do the work in both the places, that business case of outsourcing is diminished. And since the pace of innovation has accelerated, the shelf life of products has gone down. You want to manufacture your products closer and closer to where you design it. 

And so, I think this whole wave of near nearshoring and reshoring will continue and become bigger. The biggest challenge we have is that we don't have people in the manufacturing sector to bring this job back. Even Mexico, which traditionally is where we used to bring a lot of manufacturing back in North America—Mexico is at 2.5% unemployment, which is lower than even the US. There are no people anywhere to drive this reshoring and nearshoring. 

We will need more and more AI and robotics to help us take some of these more repetitive, dirty,  and dangerous jobs away from the human beings so that whatever humans we have remaining can be redeployed to more value-added work. 

Jerry Gorss: It's very interesting, all the dynamics at play here. Specific to where I spend my time, how is this affecting the industry's leadership needs? As you look at the future, what are the key characteristics a successful robotics and automation leader of the future must have, considering all these dynamics?

Ujjwal Kumar: Number one is we need fast-learning and fast-evolving leaders. Technology will keep evolving at an unprecedented rate. You see these new AI routines and new applications coming up all the time. Our customers will learn about new applications in areas where today they don't think of robotics as a solution to their problem.

So, a leader who can pivot quickly, who knows when to take something good enough, and who can evolve the offering as well as the commercial model at a fast rate as both the technology and the customers’ needs evolve will be key. 

Number two is a courageous and collaborative leader. In this new world, no one company will be able to pull in all the technologies needed to build the solution. So, leadership needs the courage to understand your true strengths and then reach out to other technology players of all sizes; it can be startups or a Fortune 500 company. You should have the courage to say, “This is not something which I'll be great at.” To build the overall solution to solve the customer’s problem, you need to have the ability to collaborate and build that bigger ecosystem.

The third one is this passion for operationalization and not just the generation of ideas. There is no dearth of ideas in the AI and robotics world today. This is one of the hottest undergrad topics in engineering schools all over the world today. But you need the ability to pick the right ideas and then go through the tough phases of executing it, learning quickly, resourcing it appropriately, project managing the execution plan—and frankly to re-pivot, to slug it out with an extreme focus on real end customer value. Like Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA says, go through the pain and suffering the resilience; it's absolutely critical to coming out strong on the other side.

So, in summary, this fast-learning and fast-evolving leader, this courageous and collaborative leader, somebody who has passion for operationalization and not just generation of ideas, in my view, are very critical things needed to build that right leadership team in this new Industry 5.0 world.

Jerry Gorss: Fantastic summary, Ujjwal. More specifically, on a topic that is extremely present right now, how does AI and software expertise affect your overall talent strategy in a manufacturing environment? 

Ujjwal Kumar: So, there is a dearth of good AI experts in the market. It's not surprising—it's a new field. But if you want to scale up your business and take advantage of AI, it is critical for us to clearly lay out our AI strategy first. 

What do you want to be in this AI-driven automation world? Do you want to build the basic foundation models the way, say, Microsoft or NVIDIAs of the world are developing? Or do you want to just leverage their foundation model and build your IP around generating the inputs that go into the foundation model and the insights that come out of that foundation model?

If you lay out what you want to be in AI, you will clearly know what kind of talent you want to hire. The AI application experts are a different set of leaders and engineers than core AI source code or foundation model developers.

So right now, we just hired a new chief AI officer for Teradyne Robotics. I went through the same brainstorming session with my leadership team to clearly define what does AI means, beyond the buzz, so that we can start building the right kind of leadership bench to be the leading AI and robotics player in the market—which we are. 

Jerry Gorss: Excellent. You've been in several of the best industrial technology manufacturing environments over the course of your career, as you mentioned.

What have you learned about leadership development in highly technical manufacturing environments? In other words, when attracting, retaining, and developing leaders, what are the things that you're looking at most? 

Ujjwal Kumar: Some of those attributes that I told you about, that fast-learning, fast-evolving, collaborative passion for operationalization, these are some of the key skillsets that I'm looking for in anyone we bring into this industry. And we are bringing in lot of people who may not have very strong AI and robotics experience. But they have end customer experience and they can be scaled up or can bring in their unique strength to help us grow bigger into the robotic automation space.

We are looking at our leadership development differently. We are, right now, developing our own tools through which we can benchmark each of our product leaders to understand if they are getting the right training to scale up in the areas where we want to grow. The tools that we had for developing the training program—for product leaders, to salespeople, to technology leaders in the old industrial tech—are not enough to help them scale up and evolve quickly in this new Industry 5.0 world. So, we are looking at our training and talent development program. 

Jerry Gorss: Excellent. Zooming back out, as you look to the future of robotics and automation, what are the one or two things that you're most excited about? 

Ujjwal Kumar: Number one is this whole democratization of the robotic automation space. I feel that the way I was running automation, it was only helping the large customers. We were giving some tools to small and medium customers. But now, large, small, medium, everybody needs this help with managing variability. Everybody needs flexible robotic automation solutions. So, this democratization of the technology and the need is the number one thing I'm super excited about. 

The second is this focus on collaboration. Now, there is no one company who can vertically integrate all the technologies to provide a solution to the end customer. It is all about collaborating, working in unity to bring our respective strengths to take this new age of automation forward. 

Jerry Gorss:  Ujjwal, this has been great. Thank you for sharing your insights and for spending some time with us today. 

Ujjwal Kumar: Thanks a lot, Jerry. This was great talking to you.

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About the interviewer

Jerry Gorss (jgorss@heidrick.com) is a principal in Heidrick & Struggles' Boston office and a member of the global Industrial, Supply Chain & Operations Officers, and Human Resources Officers practices.