When your co-worker is an AI-driven robot

When Neha Samad, who works as a senior operator at New Engineering Works' factory in Jamshedpur, was asked to train a robot to carry out maintenance of the automated machine she works with, she felt empowered, not threatened. "Before collaborative robots were introduced on the factory floor, we had to stand for more than eight hours to operate our machines and we did all the physical work, like loading and unloading components on the conveyer belt," she says. The chief executive officer of the company, Divesh Debuka, introduced "cobots", small collaborative robots by Universal Robots, in the factory three years ago to make output more efficient. Samad adapted, learnt and quickly figured how to give instructions to the cobot and make it do the physical part of her job. Her daily job, like the other human operators in the factory, became overseeing and operating machines and the cobots and keeping a tab on quality.