Physical AI robots will automate ‘large sections’ of factory work in the next decade, Arm CEO says

AI-powered humanoid robots could take over large sections of factory work within the next five to 10 years, transforming the manufacturing industry, predicts Arm CEO Rene Haas.

One of the key forces pushing humanoid robots into factories is their advantage over the robotic arms and other automation machinery in use today, Haas said. Traditional factory robots are purpose-built machines designed for a single task, with both hardware and software optimized for that specific function. General purpose humanoid robots by contrast, combined with increasingly sophisticated “physical AI” that helps navigate the real world, will be able to take on different jobs on the fly with quick modifications to their instructions.

“I think in the next five years, you’re going to see large sections of factory work replaced by robots—and part of the reason for that is that these physical AI robots can be reprogrammed into different tasks,” Haas said at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco on Monday.

“One of the issues you’d had with factory robots in the past is that if it was a pick and place machine for a factory, they’re just optimized for one task—the software was for one task, the hardware is for one task. Now, if you design a general-purpose humanoid that the software is all AI and it learns by doing, it’s going to completely replace a large set of factory workers,” he said.