Readiness Beats Timing For Physical AI

Rodrigo Madanes, Global Next Frontier Technology & AI Leader at EY.

​Physical AI has the potential to reshape any industry that manufactures, moves, inspects, maintains, builds, serves or provides direct care. By combining intelligent software, sensors, simulation, robotics and autonomous systems, it could improve worker safety, relieve labor shortages, raise productivity and change the economics of physical work.

But it will not arrive everywhere at once. Robotics is already operating at scale in some structured environments, while remaining expensive, brittle or difficult to integrate in others.

That unevenness should shape how executives respond, but not deter them. The question is not whether robotics is ready as a technology category as a whole or when it will have its “ChatGPT moment”; it is whether physical AI is becoming ready enough to address a specific task, workflow or operating problem within a business.

Leaders therefore need to understand where adoption is likely to move fastest, how to reduce risk and what capabilities are required to deploy physical AI safely and at scale. Those capabilities extend well beyond the robot itself and include data, trust, value and adoption.

The winners will not necessarily be the companies that predict exactly when robotics takes off. They will be the ones that identify where it can create value now and build the organizational readiness to scale as the technology matures.

Robotics will not arrive evenly.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, 542,000 industrial robots were installed globally in 2024, marking the fourth consecutive year above 500,000 annual installations, while the global operational stock reached nearly 4.7 million. Capital is moving in the same direction: robotics startups raised $15 billion globally in 2025, and had already raised $18.8 billion by June 2026, surpassing the previous 2021 peak.