Rob Carpenter is the CEO and Founder of Valyant AI, the first Artificially Intelligent "Digital Employee" to work directly alongside employees in customer-facing roles. For example, Valyant's AI "Holly" works in fast food restaurants to greet customers at the drive-thru post, answer questions and take food orders.

The revolutionary nature of this technology is that it pulls AI from being a hidden back-office tool to something that feels like a real staff member, which humanizes a brand's personality and brings the AI experience front and center to a physical location.

The major technological innovation of Holly is her Conversational AI. It allows her to speak with a human-sounding voice, to understand context, nuance and to be able to manage a free-form and wide-ranging conversation within the context of food ordering.

After five years of development Valyant AI now has paying customers, can deliver up to 20% average order increase and has begun rolling out with two restaurant chains that have a combined 5,000 locations. Much like self-driving cars, Conversational AI has had a long and bumpy road to deployment, but the technology is maturing, and Valyant is at the vanguard of this new era of customer service automation for physical locations.

Rob joins me in a conversation about the future of AI-human relations and its impact on the labor market - both positive and negative. We also discuss the developments in robotics and the commercialization of space travel.