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Feature Coverage
Longer-form reporting on plant operations, manufacturing technology, workforce strategy, and capital decisions.
Manufacturers expect agentic-AI use to roughly quadruple — from about 6% to 24% — within two years, per a Manufacturing Leadership Council survey cited in Deloitte's roadmap. Terex's 40-plus plants are the early yield case operators are pressure-testing in 2026.
Schaeffler's binding, thousands-unit deal with UK startup Humanoid turns 2026 into the year humanoids became a procurement line item. The wager underneath it: a unit cost that falls from $90K toward $17K before the hardware obsolesces.
Schaeffler's binding May 13 deal with London startup Humanoid bundles a four-digit robot fleet rented as a service with a five-year contract making Schaeffler the supplier of more than half the joint actuators those robots run on. The unit count is the least interesting part.
At CES 2026, Hyundai paired a humanoid production target (30,000 Atlas/yr by 2028) with named plants and dated task scope. That combination — not the robot itself — is the benchmark Tier 1 OEMs must now answer in their 2027 capex envelopes.
Hyundai committed all of Boston Dynamics' 2026 Atlas production internally, set a 2028 Georgia factory-floor start on parts sequencing, and a 2030 component-assembly expansion. Here's how the deployment schedule reads against BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla — and what operators should actually watch.
ISO/DTS 25213, drafted under an ABB-led working group at ISO/TC 299, is on track to publish in August 2026 — making kWh-per-cycle a comparable, contractable spec line for the first time.
An ISO Technical Specification led by ABB and the Swedish Institute for Standards is out for ballot, with publication targeted for August 2026. Whoever shapes the test method shapes a decade of procurement language — and most buyers haven't noticed.
Cognex's first-quarter 2026 results — $268M in revenue, up 24%, with earnings doubling and record-class margins — are the cleanest available evidence that plant-floor automation budgets kept clearing through tariff uncertainty. But management's own short-cycle, limited-visibility caution is the reason to watch Q2 before calling a durable cycle.
A $400M round earmarked entirely for deployment infrastructure, AGIBOT's 'Deployment Year One,' and Path Robotics' mobile welding cells signal the same thing: industrial robotics is no longer competing on capability. It's competing on distribution — and the sub-$10M job-shop tier is the contested ground.
A $400M Kleiner Perkins-led round at a $3.4B valuation puts Mind Robotics, Path Robotics, and AGIBOT on a collision course with the one number that matters to job shops: the loaded annual wage of a single CNC operator.