Transforming Inventory Management with Nomad Go's Spatial Vision Technology

In this episode, Jeremy interviews David Greschler, CEO and co-founder of Nomad Go, about their innovative inventory management technology. David explains how Nomad Go utilizes spatial vision and augmented reality to eliminate the tedious manual inventory counting process. The technology, leveraging the computational power of devices like iPads and iPhones, offers highly accurate and instantaneous inventory counts, mitigating the inefficiencies associated with traditional methods. By enabling more frequent and precise inventory checks, Nomad Go helps businesses reduce waste, avoid stockouts, and reallocate labor more effectively, ultimately improving bottom and top-line performance. The episode concludes with David providing insights on how to learn more about Nomad Go and their upcoming appearances at industry trade shows.

00:00 Introducing Nomad Go

00:17 How Nomad Go Works

05:46 Benefits of Using Nomad Go

07:37 Future of Inventory Management

08:54 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

Jeremy Julian: 0:00

So why don't you introduce yourself to Sure. Our listeners, since, many of them that listen to the podcast all the time, know who you are, but, yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to get the word out. you guys have one of the most amazing products and so excited for the world to learn more about it. Yeah.

David Greschler: 0:11

thank you. Thank you Jeremy. I'm David Greschler, CEO and co-founder of Nomad Go. And what we do is take what is a dreary, boring, mind numbing process of manual counting with your fingers and. Eliminate it with just the wave of a, tablet or a phone. And magically we're able to, with that wave, recognize what's on your shelf, in your make line, in your refrigerator, tucked below the POS wherever you store inventory, recognize it, and most importantly, count it, count the row, and then. Give you instantaneous feedback, right? As you're scanning to know that, oh, there's five bottles of ketchup, and it's the 16 ounce or whatever it is, versus 12 ounce, right? And, and then be able to create this effectively digital twin of your inventory, digitize the inventory, and then hit a button and go up to your, whatever system you use for inventory, whether it's back office, looks like Par, we integrate with. or people, some of our very large customers have their own inventory system, so we've built a mechanism to do integration with really any system on the laptop end.

Jeremy Julian: 1:26

Yeah, no, and I think when you guys first came out, I remember having the conversation. I was like, how does this voodoo magic actually work? Yeah. technology is amazing. you talk about the laborious process. Tell me what the world looks like for those that count. Inventory. Now it's mostly hand and some, yeah. Sometimes it's a tablet. is that kind of Yeah. I guess speak to our audiences out there that Sure is doing it now prior to Nom Mego, and then let's talk about what the future looks like. I've seen three ways people do it the most common.

David Greschler: 1:51

Is paper. Yeah. Where they either go find a sheet of paper and fill it out, or they have a piece of paper and it might be part of a sort of, shelf to sheet mechanism where they've said, this has to be here, this has to be here, this has, and they go by. the other, of course, is a tablet where they're, instead of writing down, they're typing in. and the third is maybe to help them. Scan a barcode and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then type it, count it. That's, that was the state that was the most bleeding edge technology out there. Yeah. What we're doing is just getting rid of all that through the roof. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: 2:24

so talk about, so they're scanning the camera across this inventory shelf. And how does the, is it just, not voodoo, it's like obviously the technology is there. You guys train it to know that's a 16 ounce bottle of ketchup. Yeah. Talk me through what that looks like for those that are. That are coming on board.

David Greschler: 2:39

So traditionally people have used computer vision and computer vision, will not do the job. Big surprise, right? Computer vision is fundamentally a two dimensional technology. Yeah. It sees something, bottled water and it recognizes that. And so what can say is I see a bottle of water. What it can't do is say, I see five bottle of water. Yeah. And then it, what it did, and then it's not the part that actually gives you instantaneous feedback. And in fact, most technologies take a picture of that bottle of water, send it to the cloud, ask some AI system up there, Hey, what is this? Oh, it's the, bottle of water. And then it pushes it down, right? Where we've innovated is on solving for all those problems. So our technology is really not computer vision per se, it's really spatial vision. We understand the space we under, we recognize objects, but we also understand the space in 3D. So therefore that's how we're able to tell you it's not only just a bottle of water, but you have five of them.

Jeremy Julian: 3:41

Yeah, And where did the idea come from? Like I, I know, I know a little bit about your background, but for our audience that has, the idea really

David Greschler: 3:46

came from we originally had built a fixed camera solution, which, if you think computer vision's bad, fixed cameras are maybe the worst. think about a food service environment, right? Yeah. In a pristine world, sure, everything's nice and neat, but I've never been in a back of house that's like that, right? people, restaurants have to conform to the space they're leasing. They might have some already, some cabinets there. They might have things along those lines. They're storing stuff in refrigerators. Putting fixed cameras to try to capture all that is just, that's still impossible, not great. we started there. Okay. And, and then we realized that we'll never scale and, let alone installing cameras, keeping the power on and monitoring them. So instead we realized, oh, let's take the device, let's use a smart, an I, an iPad, an iPhone, whatever, and take advantage of the compute. So remember how I talked about before, most people use computer vision. they'll maybe take videos, send it to the cloud to be analyzed, analyze it. We're using the power that's sitting right on those devices. They've got neural networks, they've got GPUs, they've got CPUs. We're taking advantage of all of them so that we can use spatial vision to recognize and count, and then use augmented reality to display all of that in real time, which means for operators. No big, hardware requirements, just get an iPhone or iPad. And secondly, no network requirements.'cause all, we really, we're not sending any imagery over the cloud. We're simply taking the results. Oh, we saw five models of order, three catch ups, and we're just sending that very light piece of data over the cloud.

Jeremy Julian: 5:20

Love that. what results have you seen?'cause one of the things that you and I have been talking about is the fact that inventory is laborious. It's hard, it takes a long time. And so people either halfass it, or they don't do it because it takes so long. Yeah. So tell me what you know now, being able to have a solution that can do these kind of things. Yeah. Help me understand where does it go from, we talked about the tech and how people have done it, but what are you seeing now is happening?

David Greschler: 5:42

Yeah, it's a really great question. So like the initial. Response people see is that it's 10 times faster than counting with your fingers, and it's 99% accurate. And the reason for that is that not only, is it really accurate, the ai, but we've, we recognize that there's somebody behind that device. And so we call it the human in the loop component. Yeah. We are right on our screen if that, if something is wrong, you can change it with your voice, with a, just a tap of your finger. You can change a number. And so the point is that might take a little more time, but at the end of the day, what do you really care about? You want accurate

Jeremy Julian: 6:19

inventory data and not taking three days to get it done.

David Greschler: 6:22

Yes. So here's the interesting thing. Initially people do this and they go, this is great, I'm gonna rea be able to reassign labor. And they are reassigning labor to other tasks. But what they also realize is I've never been able to do frequent inventory counts. Yep. Now I'm 10 times faster. I could do it instead of one time a week, maybe three or four times a week.

Jeremy Julian: 6:43

Yeah. Or some places don't do it till once a month. Yeah. And so the results are, they're able to do it once a week and get it accurate and not burn their staff out. Yeah.

David Greschler: 6:50

But this frequency thing turns out to be the real secret power. Because if you're only doing inventory once a week, you've lost visibility. Of what's happening during that week. And we all know a lot could happen. Yeah. a lot could, you could get a rush of people coming in, grabbing all your ketchup, and then you don't know. And now you're telling customers, oh, I'm sorry, I don't have ketchup. Yeah. Or water, or whatever it is. And so this ability to have it more frequently means you're gonna have less waste because you're not over ordering. And you're gonna have also less out of stocks, which of course leads to, loss of sales. Yeah. And unhappy customers. And so the big thing is the fact that what Nommed go really gives you is more frequent, more UpToDate and more accurate data so that you're gonna have the products you need and not have the products you don't need. Love

Jeremy Julian: 7:37

that. last thing we're at, we're at the RLC conference right now when we're recording this. There's a lot of uncertainty in the EN environment. Yeah. A lot of people are talking about sales volumes. A lot of people are talking about guest counts being down. How is Nomad go gonna help restaurants to run a more efficient, effective restaurant? when we're looking 60 or 90 days from now and, some of these predictions may or may not have come true. If I'm implementing Nomad go, how is it gonna change my life? Not just better inventory counts. But saving money, making money help, help our listeners, understand that

David Greschler: 8:05

it gets back to accuracy and frequency, because if your costs or goods are going up, avocados, I thought they were gonna cost me a dollar, they're now gonna cost me a dollar 20, or whatever it is. That's like a bargain these days for avocados. But if everything's going up by 20%, 10%, whatever that means. You, your waste, the cost of waste has just gone up so evermore the reason to try to reduce that. Yep. Similarly, if you run out of avocados and that customer comes there and now they're not buying from you, now you've lost the, your cost of sale effectively. Yeah. Yeah. you're down, your revenue's down all. Yeah. So having greater visibility about your inventory on hand. means, you're not only hitting the bottom line, the top line, and then of course the cost of labor as well. Yeah. By reducing that and even being able

Jeremy Julian: 8:53

to do those counts, like you said. yeah. how do people learn more? How do people get in touch? How, what's the path to say, Hey, I, do they need to talk to their back office provider? Are you guys doing direct help? Help our listeners understand what the next path is to learn more. I would say, because it is magic. I'm telling you, you see this stuff and you're gonna be like, no. It's not real. Yeah, it's not real. I've now gotten a chance to see it live and in person. I am blown away.

David Greschler: 9:11

It is. Well, thank you. Thank you, Jeremy. You're, you're, you're one of our greatest fans. I love that. Uh, and coming from you, it really, really, it's a real problem that you guys

Jeremy Julian: 9:19

are solving. It's huge. I love it. Yeah.

David Greschler: 9:21

it's wonderful. And it's wonderful to solve bumps for people, you know? Mm-hmm. Absolutely

Jeremy Julian: 9:25

not like, oh, this is nice to have. It's like no need. This is like a huge deal and Yeah. And it's gonna change the world of inventory, I'm telling you. Yeah. I'm so excited about it. So sorry. I'll let you let you share. So, no, so

David Greschler: 9:33

I would say step one, go to nomad go.com. You'll be able to, see videos. It's, the videos are slower than what it's like in real life. It's unbelievable in real life. the second is Contact Me. I'm David G at Nomad. Hyen go.com. Send me the email and I'll be sure to follow up.

Jeremy Julian: 9:52

Awesome. any trade shows that you guys are gonna be out? we're that they, that of people aren't at RLC where we're recording this, but what other shows are you guys doing? We're gonna be at f Bests Tech. Okay. So we'll be there And, are you guys gonna Chicago this year? in May. Maybe. Maybe. Okay. we're still figuring that out. Still on, on the fence. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. But we around. It's great to reconnect. Thank you very much. Your Absolutely. Thank you very much.