The billion-dollar boring category. Robot arms welding cars, AMRs moving boxes, drones inspecting power lines. This is where the money actually is — and where robots have been quietly working for decades.
The workhorses of modern manufacturing. KUKA, FANUC, ABB, Yaskawa — the Big Four of industrial robotics.
Autonomous mobile robots moving goods in warehouses. Amazon, Alibaba, and the automation of fulfilment.
Last-mile delivery robots and autonomous drones. The future of logistics is autonomous.
Boston Dynamics Spot and autonomous inspection robots in mines, power plants, and offshore platforms.
NZ Police's own restructure paperwork avoids the term AI entirely even as 41 file coordinator roles go, staff warn of accuracy risks, and the transcription team that spent two years fearing an AI-driven cull gets a separate 'modernisation programme'.
The new ISO standard specifies what industrial mobile robots tell each other — location, speed, direction, condition, tasking — regardless of vendor. Standards rarely make news; this one ends a decade of friction.
Tutor Intelligence's $75M Series B puts a16z behind a company that prices robots like temp labour: no upfront purchase, no long-term contract, billed by the hour or the pick.
The retailer's new $6 billion commitment stacks onto a decade-old robotics partnership that already runs a large share of its US distribution network.
The proclamation treats the factory floor as a security perimeter: most industrial robots sold in America are made abroad, the administration's own filing admits it, and the tariff decision is deferred to April.
A new Goldman Sachs note puts a number on AI displacement: up to 9 percent of US workers, roughly 15 million people over a decade, with slower hiring adding another 3 percent. But decades of data show the disruption concentrates in recessions — the trigger everyone fears is the trigger that fires it.
Britain's biggest bank by assets blamed no villain for its 5,000 job cuts. Its chief exec actually attributed the savings to years of systems modernisation — with AI as the finishing layer.
The task that still beats the machines is embarrassingly mundane: opening a cardboard box and removing what's inside. Walmart's answer so far is a fleet of small wheeled robots in just over a dozen warehouses — and even those break down often.
The OP1 Operator is deliberately unglamorous — a humanoid-style gripper head on a robotic arm, rolled between stations by hand and plugged into a wall. That boring design, plus a Physical Intelligence data loop, is exactly why it is working.
Evri's new bipedal courier Iris can climb stairs, carry 20kg of parcels and deliver at 2am. Barnsley gets Europe's first two-legged delivery robot trial — the town's third robot trial in eighteen months, which is itself the interesting part.
Robot.com's R-noid humanoid is loading R-kiwi delivery robots live at NACAS C3X — the first time the two have been sequenced on a campus. 350,000 deliveries say the boring part is the business model.
Robots beat hiring at US factories last year, a Bloomberg review of IFR data finds. But the same official series shows factory employment climbing since December — a more two-sided picture than the headlines suggest.