The sole breadwinner in her family, Mdm Ainiah Mahmot has been working as a cleaner for 14 years. Though initially reluctant to accept this job, she found herself starting in a supervisory role, and proved such a quick learner and diligent worker that she was promoted to being a senior supervisor within three months of joining the company.
Mdm Ainiah, who’s with Sun City Maintenance, is the cleaning supervisor for PSA Building and Alexandra Retail Centre. In her role, she not only works with 17 cleaners, but she has also been getting help from “her baby”, a robot cleaner called Ella, since November 2019. A creation of Singapore-based robotics company LionsBot, which produces cleaning robots of various functions, Ella is a LionScrub, designed to scrub large floor areas faster, using 70 per cent less water than a human cleaner. “The reason why we bring in robots is not to take over our job,” she explained. “It does its job so we can use the human manpower hours to do other