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.
MBIE's modelling says only 2% of Kiwi occupations face high automation risk — but 36% sit in the augmentation zone, and the exposure map points squarely at the $50k-$150k white-collar layer.
San Jose has no formal rules for the delivery robots already on its sidewalks. DoorDash's 350-pound Dot robots are next, and the city is still writing the playbook.
XPeng carved out its robotics business and priced it at $6.3 billion in a single round. Alibaba and Tencent are in. The IRON humanoid is supposed to hit mass production by December.
Chery's AiMOGA Robotics unit is gearing up for an IPO after deploying 110 humanoid police robots across Chinese cities and shipping 3,000 robots to 60 countries.
A Shenzhen startup backed by Xiaomi and Meituan beat Figure AI's parcel-sorting benchmark in a live one-hour test. The strategy: cheap grippers over fancy hands.
New Zealand's high wages, ACC levies, and generous leave entitlements make automation more economically rational here than almost anywhere. The question isn't if robots show up in our orchards and packhouses — it's whether anyone's planning for it.
Fanuc is putting Google's Gemini AI into 1.1 million factory robots worldwide. The partnership mirrors Android's phone strategy — Google provides the software, Fanuc provides the hardware. Shares jumped 16%.
British Gas owner Centrica is axing 1,300 call centre jobs, citing AI chatbot adoption. CEO Chris O'Shea says customers prefer it. The unions say it's corporate spin.
Ford's AI automation backfired so badly it cost billions. Now 350 'gray beard' engineers are back on the factory floor.
Microsoft's AI chief reverses his most famous prediction, employers regret AI-driven layoffs, and what Kiwi workers should do about it.
Four critical stories on AI's workforce impact: job prevention, hiring freezes, and the harsh reality of retraining.
Four stories on how AI is reshaping trust, accountability, and the relationship between humans and automated systems.