Chief Robotics Officer (CRO) – Roles and Responsibilities

If your organization depends on supply chain management (SCM) or you are a manufacturing / logistics company, sooner than later, you would be needing smart machines and robotics to manage one or more business processes. And, given AI and robotics technology trends, the need for robotics to improve supply chain / manufacturing business processes by managing the blend of human and robotics / automated workers, is only going to increase in time to come. This would essentially mean that management would require to strategize appropriately to make best use of robotics / smart machines technologies in order to manage robotics workers in supply chain processes. This would require elevation of some of these strategic initiatives to C-level management tasks. This is where Chief Robotics Officer (CRO) would come into picture.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 10 percent of large enterprises in supply-chain-dependent industries will have created a CRO position to oversee the blending of human and robotic workers.

Roles & Responsibilities of CRO

Lets us ponder upon what will be roles and responsibilities of Chief Robotics Officer (CRO). This page will be updated from time-to-time as more clarity comes into picture.

• Effectively blend engineering, IT, HR to create team / organization / management structure
• Management of different aspects of robotics life cycle; Articulate ways and means to improve the robotics / smart machines over a period of time
• Design and development of effective principles, processes and disciplines for managing robotics workers / smart machines.
• Define robotics environments and integration touch points with other business units such as supply chain etc.
• Define governance processes to manage robotics workers / smart machines; Address compliance / regulatory issues, safety, reliability and interoperability issues.
• Define and develop management techniques to manage robotics workers from time-to-time

There is an interesting read in relation with The rise of Chief Robotics Officer from Gartner.