@sharonal_lee: Software and white-collar work is getting solved. The next bottleneck for humanity is robotics. But the bottleneck in r…

Software and white-collar work is getting solved. The next bottleneck for humanity is robotics. But the bottleneck in robotics deployment today isn’t hardware or models. It’s knowing when a deployment will actually work. Before a robot goes into a facility, three questions matter: Feasibility: Can it do the task, in this environment, at the required throughput? Reliability: Will it keep working as SKUs, layouts, and edge cases change? Economics: After integration, downtime, and ongoing support, is it actually cheaper? Most deployments spend a lot of time proving feasibility and very little proving the other two. Many robots work once but deployment requires a robot that keeps working as the environment changes, at economics that make sense. The more time I spend on actual robot deployments, the more I’ve realized the expensive part of robotics isn’t finding out whether a robot can work. It’s finding out too late that it can’t keep working.