What Does '90% Success' Mean on the Floor? — with Mads Paulin, Aurianne Legris & Mehrdad Farimani
The roundtable interrogates the gap between the success rates embodied AI companies advertise (often 90%+ in curated demos) and what industrial deployment actually requires — where even small per-step failure rates compound across multi-step tasks and fall far short of the 99%+ reliability, safety certification, and ROI discipline that 30 years of automation has established as the bar.
The debate asks whether embodied AI companies understand what it actually takes to earn a spot on the factory floor, and what they'd need to do differently — on reliability, business model, and deployment readiness — to become a genuinely attractive automation solution rather than a "silver bullet" pitch. 2026 is the year embodied AI moves from pilots to real procurement decisions, backed by billions in capital. Sell demo-day success rates as production-ready, and the industry risks repeating GM's "lights-out factory" mistakes of the 1980s or the reliability frustrations of early day cobots resulting in stalled lines and years of industry skepticism. This debate sets an honest bar for "deployment-ready" before more capital and credibility are spent finding out the hard way.
Embodied AI providers' definition of success compounds to well under 60% on real multi-step tasks — far short of the 99%+ reliability, safety certification, and ROI discipline industry has built over 30 years. Vendors bet rapid model improvement closes that gap; skeptics see GM's "lights-out factory" and early cobots repeating: capital and confidence outrunning what the technology can actually deliver on a live floor. The open question isn't whether it works in a demo, but whether the AI industry understands what "good enough" means to the person who has to sign off on it.
Speakers:
Mads Paulin — Robotics leader & founder, Aitera Robotics. 20+ years in robotics and AI.
Aurianne Legris — CVC, Honda Xcelerator Ventures.
Mehrdad Farimani — Co-founder & CTO, Merphi Consultants. Sweden-based roboticist and industrial designer specializing in humanoid robot design; contributed to Sanctuary AI's Phoenix robot; guest lecturer at Chalmers University of Technology.