Three years is long enough to know what a technology is actually worth. At the SAIA Annual Convention & Exposition 2026 in Nashville, Marr Scaffolding Company and KEWAZO will look back at exactly that period: three years of LIFTBOT, KEWAZO's battery-powered lifting robot, working on Marr's job sites.
On Tuesday, July 28, 2026, Robert Dembitzki, Vice President and General Sales Manager at Marr Scaffolding Company, joins Heitor Gartner, President North America at KEWAZO, for a panel discussion on how Marr has deployed LIFTBOT since 2023. The session runs from 2:00 to 3:00 PM CT at the JW Marriott Nashville, during a convention week that brings the scaffold and access industry together from July 27 to 31.
The SAIA Annual Convention & Exposition, organized by the Scaffold & Access Industry Association, is the industry's main annual gathering in North America. Across five days it combines training courses, educational sessions, and an exhibit hall covering equipment and services for scaffolding and access. Attendees range from scaffold and access contractors to suppliers and safety trainers, which makes it the natural room for a session like this one.
What the panel will cover
On the convention schedule, the session is listed as "Product Demo - KEWAZO LiftBot". In the room, it will be closer to a conversation: a manufacturer and one of its longest-standing scaffolding customers talking through what three years of real deployments look like.
Robert and Heitor will cover how Marr uses LIFTBOT in day-to-day operations: which projects the robot goes to, how crews plan and set it up, and what changes on the scaffold when the lifting is automated. They will also talk about the outcomes Marr has seen on site and the lessons from three years of use, the practical kind that only surface after the first few projects.
Pilot projects are well documented across the industry. What happens in the years after a pilot is documented far less, and that is the part most contractors actually want to hear about.
Three years of LIFTBOT on Marr's job sites
Boston-based Marr Scaffolding Company first deployed LIFTBOT in 2023 and has used it on commercial projects across the Boston area since. That includes work in the city's downtown core and, most recently, two jobs at Harvard University: the renovation of Eliot House and a clock tower restoration.
On jobs like these, LIFTBOT takes over the vertical transport of material along the scaffold. Crews mount the system on the structure, and the robot moves loads up and down without a crane and without a line of workers passing material by hand. That is the everyday use the panel will walk through: the robot not as a novelty, but as part of how a job runs.
A downtown high-rise, a historic university residence, and a clock tower each place different demands on material logistics, and the same robot has handled all of them. These projects sit alongside the other deployments collected in our commercial case studies.
Who is speaking
Robert Dembitzki is Vice President and General Sales Manager at Marr Scaffolding Company. He speaks for the contractor: the company that decides, project after project, whether the robot goes out again.
Heitor Gartner is President North America at KEWAZO and leads the company's business in the region from Houston. He covers the manufacturer's side: what KEWAZO has learned from three years of feedback from Marr's crews.
Why this matters for scaffolding contractors
Labor availability and safety remain the two pressures every scaffolding and access company deals with, and robotic material transport addresses both. It takes repetitive vertical carrying off workers' shoulders and reduces manual handling on the scaffold.
The questions contractors ask before adopting robotics are operational, though. What does it take to train a crew? How does the robot fit into a bid? Which jobs make sense for it, and which do not? The panel is built around those questions, answered by a contractor who has worked through them on live projects.
For contractors weighing a first deployment, hearing this from another scaffolding company matters. A manufacturer can explain what a robot does. Only a contractor can tell you what it took to make it part of normal operations, and whether they would do it again.
Where to find the session
What: "Product Demo - KEWAZO LIFTBOT", as listed on the SAIA schedule: a panel with Robert Dembitzki (Marr Scaffolding Company) and Heitor Gartner (KEWAZO) on Marr's three years with LIFTBOT
When: Tuesday, July 28, 2026, 2:00 – 3:00 PM CT
Where: SAIA Annual Convention & Exposition, JW Marriott, Nashville, TN
Convention dates: July 27 – 31, 2026, with registration available through SAIA's convention page
If you are in Nashville next week, join the session on Tuesday afternoon and bring your questions. If you cannot make it to SAIA and want to know what a LIFTBOT deployment would look like on your projects, get in touch and we will walk you through it.
