The ANYmal gas-leak and presence-detection robotic is an instance of the place autonomous operations are going. Supply: ANYbotics
Final month, my workforce and I welcomed over 70 clients, companions, and trade leaders to our ANYbotics Trade Discussion board, or AIF, 2025. We spend an enormous period of time within the subject, working facet by facet with our clients at their industrial vegetation, so bringing everybody collectively in a single place for 2 days of intense, high-quality dialog allowed them to attach the dots round autonomous techniques on a totally totally different stage.
For me, it crystallized a basic shift. Within the first years of robotic inspection, the conversations have been all about mobility and autonomy: Can the robotic navigate our plant?
Now, the dialog has basically modified. It’s about shifting past the robotic to information insights, workflow integration, and the intelligence derived from the robotic‘s work, and, simply as importantly, in regards to the acceptance and collaboration required to carry folks and robots collectively successfully.
The discussions we had throughout AIF occurred towards a essential backdrop that everybody within the room acknowledged: a rising abilities hole, a retiring workforce, getting old infrastructure, and a scarcity of linked insights to make knowledgeable, asset-level choices.
It was inspiring to listen to success tales straight from corporations like Equinor, Constellium, Vigier Cement, and Titan about their robotic deployments, learnings, and the real-world influence they’re already seeing.
A robust instance got here from a buyer within the metals trade who makes use of one in all ANYbotics’ ANYmal robots for thermal inspections to detect overheating tools, stopping expensive furnace failures. It confirmed the way it scaled their operation from preliminary deployment to full adoption in only a few months, now operating 18 automated missions each single day.
The influence is evident: The corporate is minimizing security dangers for its workforce and is on monitor to save lots of over $1 million by avoiding downtime. That is what it appears like when robotics strikes from an idea to a core a part of the operation.
From these conversations, I left with three takeaways that outline the subsequent section of our trade.
1. Autonomous techniques usher within the age of Trade 5.0
We’re now not simply speaking about Trade 4.0‘s digitalization and automation. The conversations at AIF 2025 have been firmly centered on Trade 5.0 — the mixing of human ingenuity with superior, clever applied sciences.
This marks a shift to a human-centric focus, placing employee well-being on the core. It’s about making a collaborative atmosphere the place people concentrate on contextual understanding and demanding decision-making, whereas robots take over the repetitive, uninteresting, and risk-exposed duties with precision and excessive frequency.
This new, collaborative mannequin naturally raises questions in regards to the human function. Whereas the frequent narrative is that employees would possibly see robots as a risk to their every day work, the truth we’re seeing on the bottom is much extra nuanced.
Staff are usually not rejecting robots, however they’re negotiating what it means to work with them. There may be pleasure in mastering superior instruments, but additionally anxiousness round dropping craftsmanship and id. As Zac Kimbrough from Constellium completely put it throughout his speak, “Individuals are the largest hazard to my robots.”
His comment captures the essence of this transition. Collaboration is not only about machines becoming into every day operations, but additionally about people studying to adapt their very own behaviors, expectations, and sense of function.
And that is the place the true problem lies. It’s not man versus machine; it’s the organizational studying, the redefined workflows, and the mindset shift required to know how folks and robots can finest work collectively. Finally, the businesses that grasp this human-robotic collaboration would be the ones who succeed.
2. The worth is within the intelligence, not the information
My second takeaway facilities on redefining worth. One of many main challenges for any new know-how is the right way to quantify and show the long-term advantages.
In contrast with a standard robotic arm, the place the work is definitely measured in objects lifted, the enterprise case for an inspection robotic like ANYmal is extra subtle. The robotic‘s motion doesn’t present the worth; the worth comes from the frequent, exact, and remotely accessible information it produces.
This information, in flip, results in essential secondary advantages, akin to elevated security, greater plant integrity, and improved operational efficiency.
However extra information doesn’t present worth by itself. We heard clearly that merely including extra fastened sensors all over the place doesn’t clear up the core downside. Many manufacturing vegetation are already drowning in information. The problem is the standard of that information and the power to generate significant conclusions from it.
That is the place we’re seeing a paradigm shift. A cellular platform like ANYmal delivers high-quality, wealthy, and contextual information way more cost-efficiently than a dense community of fastened sensors. That is already altering asset administration methods. We’re listening to from corporations which can be stripping out redundant sensors, changing them with cellular robots to concentrate on information high quality over amount.
Much more profound, new vegetation are being designed from the bottom up with solely essentially the most essential fastened sensors, constructing the capabilities of cellular robotics into the asset technique from Day 1.
It’s this high-quality, contextualized information that unlocks the “aha” second. It’s what permits us to maneuver up the chain from information, to insights, to intelligence, and in the end, to motion. That is how we carry out root-cause evaluation and transfer from reactive to actually predictive upkeep.
3. The autonomous future is a shared ecosystem
This results in my last level: The challenges the inspection trade faces are too large for anyone firm to unravel alone, so we’d like partnerships. Going past the robotic, robotics builders like ANYbotics must ship a key piece that matches straight into our clients’ broader digital operations.
For instance, early ends in proof-of-concept functions of SAP’s robotics initiative, Undertaking Embodied AI, demonstrated as much as 50% reductions in unplanned downtime. The mission additionally confirmed as much as 25% enchancment in productiveness and important reductions in operational errors throughout manufacturing, warehouse automation, and high quality inspection.
ANYbotics gives a full-stack autonomous resolution for SAP customers that mixes ANYmal robotics with inspection intelligence. Customers start to see actual worth after they can combine the continual circulation from their robots with SAP to make their operations not solely autonomous but additionally actually clever, the place points are predicted, understood, and prevented earlier than they have an effect on manufacturing. There are quite a few different examples.
Whereas every of us focuses on our personal lane, there’s a vibrant and rising ecosystem that gives many extra. It’s the place these lanes intersect that the imaginative and prescient of actually autonomous inspection turns into a actuality.
ANYbotics charts shared path ahead
Heading into 2026, I’m extra satisfied than ever that the longer term is not only about autonomous robots. It’s about constructing autonomous, clever operations.
This can be a shared journey. So, how does “past the robotic” search for ANYbotics in 2026?
For me, it means an unwavering dedication to delivering extra worth by repeatedly increasing use circumstances, integrating new sensors, and strengthening our software program integrations. It means pushing the frontiers of reliability and security requirements to make sure our robots are essentially the most trusted instruments in your plant. Above all, it means deepening our collaboration with all of you, the pioneers who’re making this a actuality.
Concerning the writer
Peter Fankhauser is co-founder and CEO of ANYbotics, a worldwide chief in autonomous cellular robots (AMRs) utilizing synthetic intelligence for industrial inspections. He has a doctorate from ETH Zurich and 15 years of expertise in robotics.
ANYbotics mentioned it tackles essential trade challenges in security, effectivity, and sustainability. It designed its ANYmal robots for superior mobility and real-time information assortment, making them appropriate for duties akin to routine inspections, distant operations, or predictive upkeep.
With a whole bunch of shoppers in power, energy, metals, mining, and chemical compounds worldwide, ANYbotics claimed that its techniques handle labor shortages and hold employees out of hurt’s means. Based in 2009, the firm has raised greater than $150 million in funding and employs 200 consultants. It has places of work in Zurich and San Francisco.
