Q&A: Powering the ‘brains’ behind automation

AI-driven robotics is set to reshape much of industry. An example is with the company MBody AI. The firm, a technology infrastructure company providing the intelligence layer to power the autonomous workforce of the future, is run by John Fowler, the CEO and Director of MBody AI.

Fowler is a seasoned public company executive, involved in building and scaling companies in high-growth, emerging markets. Digital Journal spoke with Fowler about the potential for AI-driven robotics and the effect of this form of automation on the future economy.

MBody AI has expanded its operations into Canada with a dedicated presence in Ontario.

Digital Jornal: Could you start by sharing a bit on your background and an overview of MBody AI?

John Fowler: We deploy, manage, and scale robotic workforces for large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, under multi-year agreements. It all runs through one platform: the MBody AI Orchestrator™, a proprietary, hardware-agnostic system that coordinates a broad range of task-specific robots as a unified workforce, dynamically assigning tasks and optimizing workflows across entire facilities. To date most of our deployments have been in hospitality, principally casino and resort operators, where we’ve cumulatively provided cleaning services across approximately 561 million square feet.

After some poor life choices, I found myself with a law degree on the wall and started a commercial and securities practice. I quickly found the clients had better lives and more interesting stories than the partners, so I was looking to leave. In 2014, I left law to run the Supreme Cannabis Company, a medical cannabis company I started that year, which eventually went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange and was acquired by Canopy Growth in 2021. In that time, we raised and deployed more than $250,000,000 and built an organization that scaled to nearly 1,000 people. At one point we were growing so quickly we had to rent out the local hockey arena for a weekend to run job interviews.

Cannabis and robots are clearly different, but there’s a unifying theme of novelty and change. In both, we were in the early days of a social shift with no roadmap to follow. That’s what’s exciting here. Companies across labour-intensive industries face rising labour costs, workforce availability challenges, and growing operational complexity across distributed sites. As they turn to robots to fill the jobs they struggle to staff, a new problem emerges: coordination and orchestration get harder, not easier, as fleets grow in size and complexity. That’s where we focus.

DJ: What is MBody AI’s core platform and how does it differentiate from other AI-driven robotics solutions on the market?

Fowler: Our core platform is the MBody AI Orchestrator™, a proprietary technology platform that coordinates fleets of robots as a unified workforce, dynamically assigning tasks and optimizing workflows across entire facilities. You can think of it like an agentic manager for robotic employees. Just as a human manager learns the business and its operations, assigns work, checks that it was done, and responds to surprises, we do that with Orchestrator.

The benefit of doing it with technology is that we can parse and assess every datapoint available to us, with the goal of continually improving our customer’s key metrics.

The platform separates itself from competitors by being hardware-agnostic. Most companies in this space will sell you a robot with its own hardware, its own software, and a siloed program to run it. The MBody AI Orchestrator™ instead gives enterprises an integrated robotics workforce that’s managed, measured, and scalable across any brand of hardware through one platform. It brings multiple types of robots into a single system so they can communicate and work more efficiently. Any robot, any job, one system. That’s our mantra.

DJ: What key metrics or indicators do you focus on to evaluate performance in your solutions?

Fowler: MBody has real robots doing real work for Fortune 500 customers today, with revenue and repeat business behind it. Our most successful installations boost efficiency and provide round-the-clock service that was previously hard to obtain, whether because of labour shortages or for jobs that people no longer want to do.

At the finance and c-suite level, our clients are looking for a return on their investment: can the robots do the job at a lower cost than the existing workforce while maintaining quality? So, we measure productivity, uptime, and cost to complete specific jobs. At the operations level, we usually hear a more qualitative story: can the technology help get the work done, improve the guest or customer experience, and free other staff to focus on higher-value work?

For instance, we had a client in the gaming and hospitality industry with a key corridor that needed cleaning at least once a day by a human crew.

After introducing a robotic fleet, the client now cleans that same corridor to the same standard three times a day. That let them highlight a commitment to service through a round-the-clock robotics workforce. They told us the technology “transformed our operations” and improved the guest experience. That’s the kind of result we look for.

Beyond that, we work to simplify the use of robotics for our clients. Our multi-year agreements all run through one platform, the MBody AI Orchestrator™. We recently announced a partnership with Buyer’s Edge Platform that connects their procurement network with our autonomous solutions. Our customers aren’t just buying robots, they’re investing in a consistent, reliable outcome that we manage end-to-end across any brand of hardware.

DJ: Why is it important for robotics solutions in enterprise industries to communicate with one another?

Fowler: Just as it’s important for your human workforce to communicate, it’s important for your robotic workforce to work together instead of in partitioned silos. The sum of the robotic workforce is far greater than its parts. Think about human staff: if everyone were an individual contributor who was good at the job but never spoke to a co-worker, it would be a disaster. That’s where robots are today, good individual contributors but hard to put on a team. We’re solving that with Orchestrator.

The problem compounds with adoption. As robot penetration increases, so too does the diversity of the robotic workforce: more jobs, more robot types, more vendors. Today each original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has its own ecosystem of control applications, operating procedures, and maintenance and service. We bring that into a single platform, so the customer faces no additional complexity as the fleet grows. Instead of a fragmented system that could be a headache for even the most experienced IT leader, the MBody AI Orchestrator™ provides a single solution that houses it all.

The companies we work with are leaders in their own industries, but they aren’t experts in robotics or in managing robotic workforces. That’s where they turn to us. We deliver a managed, hardware-agnostic robotic workforce tailored to a company’s needs. That lets customers focus on what they do best and move current employees into higher-value, revenue-generating work, without needing to become robot experts. We handle the robotics network, so they don’t have to.

DJ: Where do you see the robotics industry going in the next 5 years and what is MBody’s place in it?

Fowler: The current market sees two important forces converging at the right time: labour costs are rising and workforce availability is tightening, while robotic hardware has finally moved from novelty to real value. MBody AI sits at that intersection, helping customers move from siloed pilot programs to coordinated robotic fleets in exactly the areas where enterprises struggle to hire and retain a human workforce.

Our focus for the foreseeable future is on three things: expanding our footprint into new markets, growing inside our existing Fortune 500 accounts, and deepening the Orchestrator platform to deliver more value as the integrated robotics market grows.

We expect these systems to keep becoming more common among large enterprises, starting in hospitality. The underlying driver is clear: rising labour costs and tightening availability across labour-intensive industries. As adoption grows, the coordination problem grows with it, and that’s the problem we exist to solve. Robots that can’t work seamlessly together become a hindrance rather than a net positive and getting that coordination right is how enterprises actually realize the benefit of the investment.

The one thing I’d leave you with: while many companies are focused on specific robotic solutions, we act as the coordination layer or operating system that brings different systems together into a single, unified workforce. That’s the story worth watching in this industry.