Doorway to Innovation: Chamberlain Group’s Journey to AI-Powered Access

What does the future of home access look like? Jeff Meredith, CEO of Chamberlain Group, breaks down the strategy behind smarter garage tech and connected convenience. 🔧📶

Featured on:

• Tomorrow's World Today - S9E3 – Garage Guardians

Learn more about this topic:

• Smart Garage Door Systems Are Enhancing Home Security
• How Chamberlain Group Aligns With Smart Home Security Trends

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast. We sit down with experts, world-changing innovators, creators, and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts, and more. On this episode, host George Davison, who is also the host of the TV series Tomorrow's World Today, sits down with Jeff Meredith, CEO of Chamberlain Group, to discuss the company's journey from industrial manufacturing to becoming a leader in smart access solutions. Jeff highlights innovations like the MyQ app and AI-powered features that enhance connected garage systems, while emphasizing customer insight, storytelling, and ongoing innovation as keys to staying competitive.

SPEAKER_01: 0:47

Welcome to another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. Today we have a guest named Jeff Meredith. Jeff, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02: 0:54

Thanks. Great to be here, George.

SPEAKER_01: 0:55

And you're the CEO of Chamberlain Group. Is that right? That's

SPEAKER_02: 0:58

correct.

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

I

SPEAKER_02: 0:59

sure am.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00

Well, I was hoping you'd tell us a little bit more about that. You want to give our audience a little... understanding of what the group does?

SPEAKER_02: 1:06

Absolutely. So Chamberlain Group is a leader in access control. Many people may know us for the LiftMaster garage door opener that's in their garage, but we also have products that support industrial buildings, commercial facilities, and we've recently pushed aggressively into the digital space with our MyQ app. MyQ app. Do tell. Yeah, so our MyQ app is a way for our consumers, both on the residential and on the commercial side, to be able to use our products in a digital format. So whether it's a remote open and close of their garage door or the ability to let people into their home, say a dog walker or a family member that needs access.

SPEAKER_01: 1:56

I see. That's It's nice to have, and it's all digital.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

Isn't it nice to have a digital product? You don't have to manufacture with raw materials and ship it, and it just goes to the cloud and comes down?

SPEAKER_02: 2:06

Absolutely. We've historically been the leader in industrial access products, but the overlay of MyQ on top of that has really provided a very seamless, engaging experience for our customers. One of the things that people tell me is, I don't know if I closed my garage door when I leave in the morning. Right. And they circle back around to make sure, well, you don't need to do that. You have an app that helps you to be able to see whether or not you did without circling back and driving past the home. So the simplicity with which you can manage access through our app, I think, has been a big plus for our customers.

SPEAKER_01: 2:46

That's a peace of mind, right? Absolutely. I've gone through that myself more than once. I unfortunately have to admit.

SPEAKER_02: 2:53

Yeah. And we're really enhancing that. Recently, we've started to add So we have visual cues for our customers to be able to see who's going in and out. So the idea of the garage door for many of our customers is the front door. For 70% of American homes, it's the front door. It's so true. So being able to see the goings and comings, especially of loved ones, your kids coming home from school, it's a much more enhanced experience and provides a great deal of peace of mind.

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

You know, we were talking earlier about how the garage eventually came about. We went from the horse barn to the Model A car garage, so to speak, and here we are today with this high-tech garage that does all this magical stuff for us.

SPEAKER_02: 3:45

Yeah, it's really been an interesting ride over the last several years, especially for us as a company. We had deep roots as a company in industrial manufacturing, and we made an array of products until the mid 70s we switched over to make access products and particularly garage door openers and it wasn't until we partnered with Sears and Roebuck and and really started to push more aggressively into mainstream homes in the late 70s and 80s with an automated garage door opener but if you look at the pace of innovation over just the last few years you can now have a garage door opener that has Wi-Fi connectivity that has the camera that has AI features embedded in it to be able to identify family members. And so if you think about that progression just over a short period of time, it's pretty exciting. And it also bodes well for some enhanced innovation as we go forward.

SPEAKER_01: 4:41

Yeah, that's interesting. The Sears company, when you partnered up with them years ago, what was the brand that was established that Sears was selling? Craftsman.

SPEAKER_02: 4:50

Yeah, it was sold under the Craftsman brand. Our products were, they really became a mainstream item in American homes. And if you think about this, a lot of people talk about smart home today. But the first smart home product in most homes in the U.S. was actually a garage door opener. It was an automated smart home device long before a lot of the things that are in our homes today ever appeared.

SPEAKER_01: 5:16

Well, it sounds like you've been on a pretty good journey. How long have you been with Chamberlain?

SPEAKER_02: 5:21

About six and a half, coming up on seven years.

SPEAKER_01: 5:23

Okay. And... Can you run us back to the beginning? How did Chamberlain get started?

SPEAKER_02: 5:29

What was he doing? Yeah, so Chamberlain started in the early 1900s making small industrial mechanical products. It had ropes and chains for a while and ammunition for a while. But then it acquired a company in 1968 called Permapower that was in the business of making garage door openers. And they actually made the first radio frequency controlled garage door opener. And so that marked a change of pace for the company in a movement over the next several years into access control, both on the residential side through the opener, as well as a lot of acquisitions that actually enhanced the portfolio on the commercial side. So we make gate operators, we make heavy duty commercial operators for big industrial buildings. So the push in the 70s and into the 80s for the company was really a more concentrated focus around access.

SPEAKER_01: 6:31

You know, it's interesting because access back in the day, probably most people don't remember. I mean, it was the car doors or the garage doors were open in this way. And then they went up this, you know, they came this way, which is a big change. And then...

SPEAKER_02: 6:45

Yeah, putting them on rails and actually trying and unifying them a little bit more in terms of dimensionality helped to facilitate the, you know, the automation dimensionality. of our business.

SPEAKER_01: 6:57

I can remember my mother. It was pouring down rain, right? She wants to put the car in the garage. Kids are in the car. Mom's got to get out of the car and open the barn doors and in you go. So a real problem was found. Did she make you get

SPEAKER_02: 7:12

out and do it? Probably. Probably eventually. I was the one that always, I was the guy changing the remote and opening the garage doors in my house.

SPEAKER_01: 7:20

I was pretty young at that point. Yeah, my mom's pretty, when she wants to go do something, she's on her way. Yeah, she's on

SPEAKER_02: 7:27

it.

SPEAKER_01: 7:28

But, well, it's good to see the progress over the years.

SPEAKER_02: 7:31

Yeah. You know, the company's always been a leader in innovation, and even in our early years, we focused on enhancing customer experience. There's two things that I think are really cool about the history of our company. One, we invented PhotoEye. the safety eyes that are now common so if you think about you know you know when you walk into the garage and it's closing it'll reverse out

SPEAKER_01: 7:55

and that started with a problem I remember you might want to tell our audience that what was the problem before that existed

SPEAKER_02: 8:01

yeah the problem with that is is there was actually between animals and young children and things like that that were you know in the path of a closing door and it was a hazard it was a safety hazard and so One of our engineers, Colin Wilmot, who recently passed, but he was, many people believe, the godfather of the garage door opener, came up with a way to, through the safety sensors, if a beam is broken, the door automatically reverses. And the thing that I'm so proud of is we didn't patent that. We actually gave it to our industry because it was a safety problem. It wasn't something that we should try to compete on. It was something that we should solve for our industry. So in 1993, that became standard. The federal government actually made that a standard for our products. And so that was a major point of innovation. There was another one that we initially had dip switches actually in the openers as a way to communicate with them via remotes. not the most secure path, eight and 12 dip switches. And so we also invented what we call security plus protocol, which is a rolling code, which is much more secure and prevents the possibility of people actually kind of hacking into and opening your door.

SPEAKER_00: 9:29

So

SPEAKER_02: 9:29

we've really been focused since the very beginning on innovation. Our innovation path has just shifted to more digital in most recent years.

SPEAKER_01: 9:38

So you have a consistent history of identifying challenges in the marketplace or how people are interacting with your products. Is this a focused effort by your organization?

SPEAKER_02: 9:50

Yeah, you know, the idea of continuously pulsing our customers and by customers, it's actually interesting for us because we have very tight relationships with our dealers, our local distributors. We have thousands of customers all over the world that install our products. So we try our best to listen to them. not just provide them or supply them with products. But then also we spend a lot of time with our end users. So the homeowners or the business owners or the guys that are loading trucks and moving through docks to really understand what their points of view are. And I think even over the last few years, we've tried to up our game dramatically to gain customer insights at a higher level than we ever have so that we identify problems. One of the major thrusts, and I know you know this from all your work on innovation, you have to actually allow the innovation to flow through you, flow to from insights that you derive from people on the other side. If you work too hard to create those insights on your own, but don't listen, the innovation is oftentimes useless, to be honest. It doesn't meet a real need. Yeah, it doesn't meet a real need. And so I think that as a company, we've always had our ear to the ground to try to make sure that we pay attention to what we're hearing from both our end users as well as our sort of customers or partners in the market.

SPEAKER_01: 11:21

So let's talk a little bit about your brand today. How big is this company? First of all, if I go to the store and I want to buy a garage door opener today, what's the brand I should be looking for?

SPEAKER_02: 11:33

So if you go to a retail store, you would find Chamberlain brand as our product. If you are... A person that wants to call a professional installer, you would find the LiftMaster brand. So LiftMaster brand is our lead brand for our commercial business, as well as for our pro channel on the residential side. Our Chamberlain brand is the brand that you would find in Lowe's or Home Depot. Overlaid both of those brands is our ecosystem brand called MyQ, which is our app that has nearly 13 million users already of that app.

SPEAKER_01: 12:09

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_02: 12:10

Yeah, it's been a really interesting last several years and the growth has been even, you know, exceeding my own expectations. But a lot of users in an app that is, I'd stack it up versus any other smart home app that's out there. So Chamberlain, LiftMaster, and really overarched by MyQ.

SPEAKER_01: 12:30

So let's talk a little bit about how all that happens. How many employees do we have here at Chamberlain?

SPEAKER_02: 12:35

You know, we have... around 6,000 employees in total.

SPEAKER_01: 12:40

Okay. We're moving quite a bit of product. Is that right? What are we talking?

SPEAKER_02: 12:44

Yeah. I mean, we sell in the millions every year of all of our different access products. So between our openers on the residential side, several million, and then as well on the commercial side. So it's a business that has scale to it. One of the cool things about our business, and this was a reason that I sort of took notice when I was thinking about joining the company. We're present in 51 million homes in the US. If you think about a brand like Whirlpool, it's in 40, you know, around 40 million homes. So the fact that we're in that, there's 62 million homes in the US that have a garage. So our presence is strong. And whether it's new construction or repeat purchases, we're oftentimes the incumbent. And so we'll gain that that resale or that sale of the next product as well. So yeah, it's a sizable business and one that we're overlaying MyQ on top of to really provide that framework to enhance with services and just a better overall experience.

SPEAKER_01: 13:53

Yeah, sounds like you're making good progress. Speaking of progress, I was hoping you could take us a little into the future today. Sure. And it seems like the hot buzzword is AI nowadays. And is Chamberlain starting to push for further into that space?

SPEAKER_02: 14:08

Yeah, we really are. And we're trying to find artificial intelligence applications throughout our business. But I'll give you a couple examples of ones that I'm really proud of. And I think so many people are, as you said, sort of grabbing onto this idea of AI in a buzzword sort of sense, but not thinking about practical applications and things that are actually going to enhance user experiences. There's two things that we've done recently that I think are examples of how AI can bring new dimension and new capabilities to your product the first is if you think about the idea of your child coming home from school we can historically we would have provided you a notification that says you know it's 3 20 your door opened and then it closed Now we can actually, with the help of our video-based products that we offer, and you identifying those family members that you want to have their facial recognition capabilities, we can say, in my case, it's 3.20, your daughter Megan just got home from school, she's safely in the house, and would you like to see a quick video? That's peace of mind that I think is super valuable to a parent. So I think that's AI because it's identification and it's stitching together a series of events. Another is, let's say you got a notification at 11.30 at night that there's motion in your backyard. If the notification says there's an animal detected in your backyard, that says maybe my dog's out. Very different than motion detected could be anything. If an animal is identified, you'll check to see if, in my case, my dog Rex is safely in the house. And so I think use of intelligence and putting stories together to help users really understand context is how we're trying to deploy AI in a very meaningful way.

SPEAKER_01: 16:25

That is meaningful. I know I've been there many times. Lights are going on, alarms are going on, you don't know what's going on outside. So to have that peace of mind is a real blessing in my book.

SPEAKER_02: 16:38

Yeah. Again, it's tapping into things that you as a homeowner, and as a customer of ours, would value additional insight on. It's those things that give you a warmth inside to know what's happening as opposed to the uneasiness of something that gives you just a little bit of information but not enough to sort of squelch the anxiety that you might

SPEAKER_01: 17:03

have. Sure, sure. All right, now that we've kind of hit the future, what about some of the challenges you see coming in the future with... the industry that you're in. Are there any other challenges you can see?

SPEAKER_02: 17:15

You know, I think every industry faces A similar challenge in that pace is going to have to continue to accelerate. As you infuse technology into every industry in ways that may not have existed in the past, you bring new competitors, potentially new competitors, and new competitors that are coming at businesses from different angles than you that may have not endured three-year, two-year development cycles but may be on six-month development cycles that may offer really enhanced digital experiences that you might not have done in the past. I think in our case, and I'm talking more about industrial businesses because I think everything over time is going to actually migrate into more of a tech-based overlay to whatever business it is. So if you're just providing an industrial hardware experience, you better be put in services you better be put in digital capabilities on top of it these days or else you're going to get passed by so I think pace of play is really going to be critical and as a company we're trying to do things in a way that has the right back-end infrastructure the right architectures the right modularization to be able to move at a pace faster than we ever have

SPEAKER_01: 18:44

that's nice yeah that's if you can make that a core competency of your business makes it harder for your competition to get in that space of yours, right?

SPEAKER_02: 18:52

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 18:52

Yeah. So, okay. So I see the challenge. How do you make sustainability and speed happen in the R&D department and then integrate that into manufacturing and out into the storytelling phase, right?

SPEAKER_02: 19:06

Yeah. And I think the other thing, and you and I have talked a little bit about this, but storytelling is going to be more and more important because the experiences that you're bringing aren't as simple as they used to be, right? Mm-hmm. Trying to tell a parent the story of peace of mind seeing their kid come home from school every day is a little bit more complex, right? Sure. Than just we open and close your door.

SPEAKER_01: 19:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 19:30

Right? So I think storytelling and coming up with unique ways to make sure that what you've done from an innovation standpoint can be told to the ultimate consumer is critical because if not, then no matter how cool it is and how amazing it is, it's not going to be embraced if it's not understood through proper storytelling.

SPEAKER_01: 19:54

Exactly. Yeah, we're big on storytelling around here. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02: 19:57

That's one of you guys' real strengths.

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

The way you said that, it's very interesting because I don't get a lot of CEOs who really grasp that concept as well as you have. So it's nice to hear. Because if you have the greatest innovation in the world and you can't figure out a way to tell that story, it's just... It's a door going up and down, right?

SPEAKER_02: 20:18

Yeah, it's tech for tech's sake. It's not tech for human benefit.

SPEAKER_01: 20:23

I

SPEAKER_02: 20:24

have an engineering background myself and one of the worst things that you can do is work for a year or a year and a half on something and then it doesn't achieve the commercial success that you actually wanted and you feel like it was such an amazing thing what happened. And I think a lot of times companies don't go the last mile and make sure that the story is told effectively and they've really thought about about the go-to-market strategy with the same rigor and the same focus that they did the innovation itself.

SPEAKER_01: 20:53

Right. A lot of companies, they have strengths in the R&D side, and some companies have a lot of strengths in the manufacturing side, and some have the storytelling. But if you have all three working really well together, that's like a symphony.

SPEAKER_02: 21:09

Yeah, no, it is. And it's been a lifelong mission for me to try to piece that whole thing together. And it's challenging because... Sometimes, you're right, your company's history is more on the engineering side, maybe less on the storytelling side, or vice versa. And you've got to try to make sure that you piece the whole thing together. And it's not a handoff, it's an integration all the way through. Because the best stories that you can tell actually start from the beginning. So if I craft a story and then the innovation flows, as opposed to I try to stick a story on the end, And after the innovation is done, it's just very different.

SPEAKER_01: 21:50

I've found sometimes that the area where you're talking with customers and they're giving you feedback, they're telling you where there are challenges, maybe where there's something great, maybe something not so great that identifies a problem. We go invent a solution, right? And that's really good ground to find compelling stories, right?

UNKNOWN: 22:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:14

I know it's tough to talk about sometimes, but back in the old days before that invention came around where the eye stopped the door from coming down, several times a year you'd hear about a dog or somebody getting hurt by a door coming down. And that's a very dramatic situation. So by solving that problem, that's a heck of a great story. It's got all the right makings for how to tell a good story and let the population lift their current situation and prevent that problem from happening again. We had a

SPEAKER_02: 22:50

lot of really passionate engineers that wanted to solve that not for the sake of our business, but for the sake of our customers and just the safety of our population. So I wasn't in the company at the time, but it's one of the stories that I'm really proud of. But I think your point, there was a need, a real need, right? And uncovering the real need and having passion around solving for that real need is kind of the lifeblood of innovation. You know, to me, that's, you know, if you can really sort of think that this is such a compelling need and we are the company that's going to solve this need and get everybody sort of rallied around that, that's when, you know, cool stuff happens in an organization. It really is.

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

Well, thanks for everything you're doing.

SPEAKER_02: 23:48

Yeah. Thank you for having me today. I really appreciate it. You betcha.

SPEAKER_01: 23:51

Well, everybody, that's another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. Bye now.

SPEAKER_00: 23:56

Thank you for listening to this episode of Tomorrow's World Today podcast. Join us next time as we continue to explore the worlds of inspiration, creation, innovation and production. Discover more at tomorrowsworldtoday.com. Connect with us on social media at TWT Explore and find us wherever podcasts are available.