92 Since the first industrial robot, Unimate, joined the General Motors production line in West Trenton, New Jersey, in 1961 to lift hot metal die-castings, robots have reshaped manufacturing. As well as performing tasks that would be unsafe for people, robotics has enabled businesses to make considerable gains in productivity, precision and consistency. Yet for all the progress made over the past six decades, most industrial robots have remained fundamentally constrained: rigid systems executing predefined instructions in tightly controlled environments. That paradigm is shifting. According to John Chien, director of industry and product marketing at Microsoft, the industry is entering a new phase defined by what is increasingly known as ‘Physical AI’. “The core narrative is this: the industry is moving from hard-coded, single-purpose automation to adaptive, AI-driven physical systems that can perceive, reason and act in real-world environments,” says Chien. “Physical AI refers to intelligence moving into the physical world… into factories, hospitals, logistics, mobility and so on. This is the next frontier for AI platforms, and it’s being shaped right now.” But Chien is quick to stress that the true inflection point lies in scaling intelligence across entire industrial systems. “The real challenge isn’t building one smart robot,” he says. “It’s operationalising physical intelligence at scale: deploying, governing and continuously improving fleets of intelligent machines across sites, environments and vendors. That's an enterprise platform problem, and it’s where the most interesting tension sits right now.” For decades, industrial robots have excelled in precision but struggled with flexibility. Any change in task, environment or product line has As manufacturers move beyond fixed automation towards adaptive, AI-driven systems, Microsoft’s John Chien explains why the real transformation in robotics is not about individual machines, but about orchestrating intelligence across entire industrial operations BY RICHARD HUMPHREYS FEATURE entering its next Robotics is industrial era
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