Businesses and industry individuals jumped on a Zoom call in April to find out more about how AI was changing the industry.

The session was free to attendees and kindly organised by the Worshipful Company of Launderers (WCL) and funded by their Education Committee. Ken Cupitt, president of WCL, welcomed everyone and introduced the first speaker, Sanjay Sauldie, CEO of Sauldie.org, a digital business expert and an award-winning expert in internet marketing.

Sauldie first took the time to educate the group on the basic grounding of AI and the tools at people’s disposal. Given there are in excess of 30,000 AI tools, Sauldie gave the group some handy tips of go-to tools that will make an instant difference to how we all work day-to-day. For example, for creative answers and to seek inspiration he recommends ChatGPT or DeepSeek. For research, use Perplexity or Elicit. If a business is looking to hand over workflow or processes to AI such as invoicing, then he suggests you turn to Emma or Make tools.

To help cut through the volumes of AI tools he recommends that www. theresanaiforthat.com is a great starting point.

The group were then able to quiz Sauldie about suggestions for tools that would help them in their daily tasks – for note taking and summarising meetings, blocking calls and tools that will actually answer their emails for them. Sauldie reminding people that tools like these are often great starting points creating a draft email for example that should then be checked and personalised.

Markus Kobel, CEO of Laundry Robotics and Biko Engineering was the second speaker of the session. Kobel and his team develop laundry machines using robotics, vision systems and software based on AI.

Left: Sanjay Sauldie, digital business expert. Right: Markus Kobel, CEO Biko Engineering and Laundry Robotics

Kobel explained the need for deep learning and training the AI brain in machines. So for robots to sort linen, they need to build up knowledge of many pieces of linen of all shapes and sizes. This enables the machine to classify the linen and identify what to sort, and for who and what to discard. This involves feeding the brain with hundreds of images of linen and training the AI brain to spot corners and deformable features. Kobel used a video in the presentation to demonstrate this. Kobel also explained that using AI in machines is not necessarily about reducing numbers of staff. It’s about increasing output and productivity, and allowing the robots to carry out the repeatable tasks – deploying human staff for the jobs that humans do best.

He firmly believes that AI is not a hype and offers many possibilities. In the next one to five years, he sees that AI will be integrated into all daily tasks and the technology will spread into all areas of the laundry. Today it’s already effective with it’s data collection to help with predictive maintenance, quality control and reducing downtime. For the robotics side, AI works with just towels for now, but this will eventually shift into sheets, napkins and then garments.

This will happen as the machine’s brain continues to be trained with more images and deep learning. At the moment towels are easy to detect due to their corners. Fitted sheets and garments are less so as their edges and corners tend to be more scrunched up. In time, this will happen.

This is just some of the topics covered during the two-hour session. A link to the presentation is available from the Worshipful Company of Launderers website in the Latest News section.