At Auzmor, we've spent years helping enterprises onboard, upskill, and reskill their workforce through our LMS platform. From the beginning, we took an ecosystem approach, building a content marketplace alongside our LMS and partnering with third-party marketplaces to give our customers access to a huge catalog of authentic training content. We've also integrated AI into our products along the way.
But we've always confronted reality and asked the tougher questions. Questions around AI's impact on the workforce. Questions about what's inevitable.
The Evolution: From Tools to Teammates
Two things I'm very bullish about have emerged from this thinking.
First: Products will evolve from being tools to becoming true partners—team members at work. I see agentic AI as just a transition to a much more useful state: the teammate. A teammate who will sometimes outperform you and sometimes depend on you, but overall a teammate that will accelerate your growth.
When Microsoft picked "CoPilot" as their brand name, I envied them—not for the tech they're building or the deals they made, but because they got the name right. CoPilot perfectly captures this evolution.
While this transformation is primarily about knowledge workers, there's a significant portion of the workforce that isn't just about knowledge work. What about that workforce? How is that going to change?
The answer isn't very surprising.
The Missing Piece: Generative AI Meets Robotics
Robotics as an industry has had its niche focus primarily because robots aren't completely autonomous. Generative AI is that missing piece for robotics.
Bring generative AI together with actuators, lidars, and cameras, and you have a machine—an evolved one that can interact with environments primarily built for humans. This is our new workforce for the riskiest jobs, but it's really about finding a happy medium. In most scenarios, you're looking at a hybrid workforce where humans and robots work as a team to make progress.
Once this became obvious to me, we knew we wanted to focus on enabling everyone to add custom capabilities to these workforce robots. Capabilities in the robotic world are skills.
Introducing Synth42: The Full-Stack Robotic Skills Platform
That's why we're building Synth42, a robotic skills platform that takes a full-stack approach.
Synth42 Store is where companies can find vetted, reviewed, and tested skills that they can deploy to their robot fleet. The Store solves the discovery piece for companies and provides visibility for skill developers. We want to be one of the first app stores for robots.
Building a robotic skill is evolving rapidly. The whole stack—frameworks, SDKs, abstractions—are evolving every day. The stack on which robots run is also getting standardized. We're not very far from finding the Android for the robot world. ROS is a framework built for this, and incumbents in the mobile world are already betting high on it.
Skill development also needs simulators to test and iterate on skills. We're bringing this whole stack of skill development under one roof with Synth42 Forge—our skill development app that includes seamless simulator support, URDF and MJCF libraries for robots and environments, and testing scenarios.
While Forge and Store focus on skill discovery and development, there's still one important piece: enterprises need to securely deploy these skills, monitor robots, and track robot activities. That's the reason behind Synth42 Pulse—an app to ensure you skyrocket productivity and safety with an autonomous robot fleet while staying in control.
All these apps and more in the future will be powered by the Synth42 platform, which comes with a native robot stack that not only takes care of skill development and management but ultimately helps build robots.
Why 42?
While "Synth" is a natural choice for our platform, "42" is where the essence lies. For science fiction fans, you can probably connect why 42 and why it's relevant for this platform. But for the uninitiated, in Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," 42 is "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" that the "Deep Thought" giant computer came up with after thinking for 7.5 million years.
I believe we're at that moment now. As humanity, we are one major event away from accelerating a hybrid workforce, but the job is only half done. What do we plan to do with this new capability? What are the right questions we finally ask?
42 is a reminder to ask those right questions.
