Warehouse Inventory Visibility with Drones and AI: Gather AI CEO Explains

Most warehouse operators have no idea what's actually happening on their floor right now. Not a rough estimate. No idea. The WMS says one thing. Ground truth is something else entirely. And the workers running the operation walk 12 to 15 miles a day on concrete trying to close that gap. In this episode, Blythe talks with Sankalp Arora, CEO and Co-Founder of Gather AI, live at Manifest 2026. Gather AI uses drones and cameras on forklifts to give warehouse operators real-time inventory visibility with no power drops, no new infrastructure, and a facility map completed in one to two weeks. Average customer payback: 4.5 months. In this episode: • How drones and forklift cameras work together to turn a warehouse into real-time inventory intelligence -- no power drops ($15,000 each to install), no Wi-Fi constraints • Why half of every warehouse's total cost is people and equipment traveling, and what that means for where automation investment actually pays off • The "Amazon Go store" analogy: what a fully instrumented warehouse looks like in practice • Why the average warehouse worker walks 12 to 15 miles a day on concrete -- and why fixing that is as much a retention play as a productivity one • What the software stack looks like on a day-to-day basis and why workers end up living in Gather AI's dashboard instead of the legacy WMS • The 3-step buying framework for operators who've been burned by big capex automation projects before • What Gather AI's $40M Series B is funding and what end-to-end warehouse orchestration looks like in practice • Sankalp's straight answer on the one-person warehouse question: 5 years out, no. 10 years with humanoid robots, high conviction yes. Links and resources: • Gather AI website: gather.ai • Email Sankalp directly: [email protected] • Gather AI on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/gather-space-ai • Everything is Logistics: everythingislogistics.com • Freight tech vendor research: cargorex.io • Presented by SPI Logistics: success.spi3pl.com