Investors are pouring billions into humanoid robots. But are we looking at the future of manufacturing or another tech hype cycle?
In this episode, John Koetsier sits down with Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), to separate hype from reality in the rapidly evolving world of robotics.
After more than four decades in the automation industry, Jeff shares why he believes humanoid robots are likely to become common in factories and warehouses within the next decade—but probably not in our homes anytime soon.
Watch here:
The conversation covers:
- Why manufacturers care about results—not whether a robot looks human
- The biggest challenges facing humanoid robots today, including safety, reliability, and cost
- Why today’s robotics industry is still deep in the hype cycle
- Whether robots actually create jobs instead of destroying them
- China’s massive investment in robotics and what it means for global competitiveness
- Why the U.S. needs a national robotics strategy
- The future of AI-powered automation, warehouses, factories, and home robots
Jeff also explains why robot safety standards may be the single biggest factor determining how quickly humanoids are adopted—and why automation has historically helped manufacturers stay competitive while creating new kinds of jobs.
Whether you’re following AI, robotics, manufacturing, or the future of work, this conversation offers a grounded, experience-driven perspective on where the industry is actually headed.
Transcript: humanoids in manufacturing
Jeff Burnstein:
I believe that within the next decade, we’re likely to see humanoids at scale in factories or warehouses. Probably not in our homes. I think we’re a long way from that.
John Koetsier:
I’m so excited to have this conversation today. Our guest is Jeff Burnstein. He’s been the president of the Association for Advancing Automation for four decades. Four decades. This man has been there, he has done that, he has seen a few things. He’s been from the early days of automation to the insanity of the AI that we now have under our control and what we’re building right now.
I mean, incredible. We now have humanoid robots. That’s the new, new thing. We’re going to dig into that, the hype, the substance, the timeline. Welcome, Jeff. How are you doing?
Jeff Burnstein:
Doing great, John, and thanks for that introduction. Let me just clarify one thing. I’ve been with the association for over four decades, but I’ve been president for 19 now.
John Koetsier:
That’s even better. That’s even better because you’ve done a variety of jobs and tasks, but learned it all, and now you’re leading it for two decades. That’s amazing. Let’s jump into humanoids, and we’ll talk about other forms of automation as well. You’ve got a big conference coming up in two weeks, and there’s all sorts of things there.
But we’ll focus a little bit on humanoids. Big picture, what are you seeing when you see all the investment, all the new robots, all the new companies, everything that’s boiling over right now in this space?
Jeff Burnstein:
It’s exciting. It’s really hard to know what to make of it, because is this the form factor of the future?
Do customers even care about the form factor? I mean, what I hear from customers is, “Look, we need a solution. If this is a better solution than existing form factors of robots or no robot, we’re good. We just need solutions, things that work, things that are proven reliable, affordable.” And we don’t know yet, what are the use cases for humanoids?
And are they going to be affordable and reliable? So that’s what I hear. Those are my questions. I think, ultimately, I’m in this: if there’s a range of people who say it will never happen on one end, and the range of people who say, “Oh, this year we’re going to ship 100,000 of these humanoids,” then I’m somewhere in the middle.
But probably, I believe that within the next decade, we’re likely to see humanoids at scale in factories or warehouses. Probably not in our homes. I think we’re a long way from that.
John Koetsier:
The super interesting thing is we see all these billions. NEURA Robotics just announced this morning, I think it was a $1.4 billion raise.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
Figure has raised enormous amounts. You name it, the Chinese manufacturers as well. There’s massive spillover effects to other areas as well, right? Because grippers. Yeah. We’re seeing such insane innovation in hands. The hands I saw from 1X just a couple weeks ago, I couldn’t share it. He shared it with me privately.
The speed that it was moving with, the dexterity and ability to manipulate, was incredible. Even if somebody chooses a different form factor, whether it’s wheeled or whether it’s stationary or whatever, the dexterity has got to be a big boon for robotics in general, you assume.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah. And that’s a really good point.
In fact, I spent the last couple days with Adil Akhtar of PSYONIC. We were in Chicago doing some advanced promotion for the Automate show, where he’s going to be exhibiting. And his hand is pretty amazing as well, and it also has the benefit of being something that people who’ve lost their hands can use.
So it has that function as well, a bionic hand for people who no longer have a hand, and for a robot to be more effective. Yeah.
John Koetsier:
That’s a use case I hadn’t even considered, that we’re developing better hands. Maybe eventually they’ll be attached surgically to people. Who knows? Let’s talk about the hype cycle.
You mentioned a little bit about that. We know the hype cycle. The hype cycle goes up, it’s super hypey and everything, and then we hit the trough of disillusionment, right? When reality hits. And a lot of technologies follow this, and then we get into the, I forget what Gartner calls the upslope of actual good use. But where do you think we are right now?
Jeff Burnstein:
I think we’re heavy in the hype cycle. I mean, I think we haven’t proven anything other than some production. Like, for instance, the only humanoid in production in the U.S. that I’m aware of is an Agility robot in a GXO Logistics plant.
Now, they may have other ones too, but I don’t know of anybody else who’s in actual production with a humanoid. Yeah. I see a lot of pilots, and I see a lot of stories saying these pilots are maybe 20%, 50% effective. That’s not enough. I mean, customers need 99-point-whatever in order to be certain of using these technologies.
And I talk to a lot of industry leaders. Some are saying, “Yeah, I think they’re going to get there. I think it’ll be great.” Others are saying, “I just don’t see it. I don’t see how this is going to work. And this idea that they can do everything, I’d like to see them do one thing.” So.
John Koetsier:
Yeah, Agility Robotics. I talked to Peggy Johnson, like, two years ago, the CEO there.
It was the first robot to get a kind of real job that we heard of, at least. Figure has a bunch of demos going. Apptronik has a bunch of demos going. There are others that have a bunch. Yes, exactly. Right. Exactly. It’s who will get it into production.
Jeff Burnstein:
Into production.
John Koetsier:
The reality is that, I mean, if you look at the speed of most humanoids, it’s not there yet, right?
If you do look at the rate of improvement, it’s impressive, and that’s why you have this impression that you talked about within this decade we’ll see something there. Talk about your members and what they’re saying in more detail. I mean, they’ll accept anything, right? If it works, if it’s better, if it does a job, if it’s cost-effective.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
They don’t really care if it has two legs or wheels or looks like a human.
Jeff Burnstein:
Exactly. And that’s where the uncertainty comes in, that some of the members are saying, look, they’ve looked at this. They really don’t see it. They don’t think it could be more effective than existing traditional industrial robots, if you will, or collaborative robot arms on a mobile base. They just don’t see it.
Others are saying, yeah, they think there’s a lot of promise here and that it’s developing quickly. Others are saying, I’m told, that they’re just not even ready for it, that their whole process isn’t ready for this yet.
But I’ll tell you what the biggest concern is, is safety.
John Koetsier:
Mm.
Jeff Burnstein:
I feel like until we have humanoid robot safety standards, nobody’s going to be safe using them. Yeah. I don’t think insurers are going to be happy. I don’t think OSHA will be happy. Even in the production that Agility is doing at GXO, they’re not around people.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
They’re kept away from people. Now, I don’t know what’s happening in China. I don’t know if the Chinese are as concerned about robot safety, but we certainly are. We developed the first American National Robot Safety Standard back in 1986. It became the basis of the ISO standard. And I can tell you that in the early days, if there was an accident involving an industrial robot, it had a chilling effect on the industry.
Everybody said, “Oh, the robot’s not safe.” Even though it might have been the person, or they went around the safety fence. Doesn’t matter. We saw this with driverless cars a few years ago when, at first, if there was an accident or something went wrong, the pilots were stopped or something.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
We’re getting past that, I think, in driverless cars. I think we’ll eventually have safety standards for humanoids, but until we do, I don’t know how quickly we can grow.
John Koetsier:
It’s really interesting. I just had the head of product design for 1X, which makes the NEO humanoid robot, on the show, and he talked about safety as well, and said, “Hey, our robot is 60 pounds, and it’s fabric covered. It’s soft.”
Whereas many of the humanoids are 200, and they’re metal, and if they fall on your dog, it’ll crush it, or your toe, or whatever the case may be. That’s a huge thing, and being able to sense and being known to be safe and not just probabilistically safe, but deterministically safe, or at least a high level of that, is huge.
I want to get into what it looks like if we have adoption. Do you ever see a factory coming, maybe it’s a decade from now, that has 10,000, 1,000 humanoids working?
Jeff Burnstein:
Joe Engelberger, who was the father of robotics, once told me, “Look, if you’re going to make predictions, make them far enough into the future so you won’t be alive to see if you were wrong or not.”
John Koetsier:
I’ll be retired. Nobody cares.
Jeff Burnstein:
So I don’t know. I mean, a factory with 10,000 humanoids is hard for me to imagine right now because it’s not clear that, like I said, that is even a form factor that’s going to have any success yet.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
We’ll see. I mean, Hyundai talked about buying a whole bunch of Boston Dynamics humanoids, which they own.
Tesla’s talked about millions of them. They’ve said it’s going to be the biggest product in the history of the world. And I would ask, if that’s true, why isn’t Tesla using them in manufacturing at big scale?
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
So I wonder.
John Koetsier:
I think you’re right to wonder there. I think that we have automation, which is robotic, which is not remotely humanoid, which involves machines that can be massive and huge, which are already incredibly fast, incredibly capable, and get it right to many nines, and we’re going to have more and more and more of that.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
And I kind of think we probably won’t have the factory with 1,000 humanoids. You’ll have some. You’ll have a few, and you’ll have some in the home, and you’ll have some doing delivery. You’ll have some in logistics. But I don’t see it being the engine.
That’s human-centric. It’s funny, I saw a story just earlier today, and it was about the introduction of the steam engine, and whether that led to productivity gains in factories around the turn of the previous century. The reality is, it didn’t for decades, and the reason why is that they took out what they had, they put in a new thing, and they didn’t change how they did things.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
Exactly. That’s the point, right?
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah. Yeah. If you’re going to… And that’s why some of the companies are telling me, “Look, we’re kind of fascinated by humanoids. Our process is nowhere near ready to implement them.”
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
But I just think there’s… I agree with you.
I just don’t see tens of thousands of these in factories or in a single factory, because I don’t think they’re going to be able to do everything better than existing robots or people even.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
You know, I just think, again, AI is changing this very rapidly. I understand that. The intelligence of these robots could be much better much sooner than I think.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
The dexterity could be much better much sooner. All these things could be true, but it’s hard for me to imagine.
John Koetsier:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s true largely because if you have a factory today, there’s standard traditional robots which are doing a huge amount of work, and that’s going to continue to grow.
That will continue to grow, and that’ll be huge and fast and purpose-built for what it needs to do. I think you will have humanoids there, but probably not 10,000. You’ll have some, just like you have some humans right now, and I think that the home is a huge market, all that stuff.
I want to talk a little bit about jobs and robots, jobs and automation.
I mentioned Standard Bots to you as we were prepping for this call. They just released that they raised $200 million yesterday. Yeah. Their press release was huge about how automation leads to more jobs, and they’ve got some research that backs it up. I checked that out. There’s some contrarian research. There’s some additional supporting research as well.
But the pitch was pretty simple, which is that, hey, if overseas they’re automating, let’s say China, which has 54% of the world’s industrial robots, two million in the fleet, and you’re not, you’re going to lose. If you add them, you’re going to be more competitive. You’ll make more money. You’ll be able to have more people working in more types of roles. Buy that? Agree with that?
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah. Well, that’s pretty much my message. I’ve been answering this question since 1983. And we always believed that robots were not going to be job killers. The real job killers are when companies can no longer remain competitive.
In fact, we had a slogan back in the early ’80s, “You have a choice here in America. You can automate your tasks in order to compete, or you can emigrate your jobs to China or elsewhere, or you can evaporate.” And a lot of companies chose to chase low-cost labor in Asia.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
And we think had they automated, they would’ve been better off.
They would’ve saved a lot of jobs. We actually then started looking at this, and what we found is really interesting. We have a chart that dates back more than three decades, and it tracks robot sales versus employment and unemployment. And what we found is that whenever robot sales have gone up in the U.S., unemployment has gone down.
Interesting. And when robot sales have gone down, unemployment has gone up. And the reason is what you alluded to, that as companies invest in robots, they become better positioned to win new business because they’re more productive, the quality’s better, they can get stuff out faster. And as a result of winning new business, they can hire more people.
And the real risk, when all the jobs are at risk, is if you can’t compete anymore. And so that’s exactly what we talk about.
John Koetsier:
Super interesting. It’s counterintuitive because people think AI’s coming for the white-collar jobs, and robots are coming for the blue-collar jobs. There’s nothing left. We have to go to UBI, universal basic income, for everybody, and we’ll all live sort of without a job, so.
Jeff Burnstein:
Well, do you believe that? Because I certainly don’t.
John Koetsier:
I think there might be a role for UBI in some cases. Well, maybe. But I hope that won’t be our future as a whole.
Jeff Burnstein:
Look, there are almost 500,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs today. The predictions are that could get to 1.9 million by 2033.
It’s not that there aren’t a lot of jobs out there, it’s they’re not the jobs people want to do. And so, as a result, we’re going to be an increasingly automated society. The jobs that people do will be different. Instead of walking six miles a day in a warehouse carrying heavy boxes, they’ll be overseeing robots.
They’ll be designing systems, installing them, operating them, maintaining them. There’ll be all kinds of new jobs that we can’t imagine. This has happened with the internet. People said that was going to put everybody out of work. Home computers, we don’t need secretaries anymore. All these things that were supposed to make us have fewer jobs have led to a great explosion of jobs.
I mean, I really feel like, I think somebody told me once, in the last 30 years, 50% of the jobs that exist today are new. And you think about it. So when I give speeches, I’ll say, “Okay, how many in the room would’ve said 30 years ago that there would be a good, high-paying job called search engine optimization specialist?”
Not a single hand goes up because there were no search engines. How about app developer for iPhone? Well, obviously the iPhone wasn’t developed 30 years ago. So jobs change. Yeah. And we react, and we adapt. Now, will there be people who are disadvantaged? I imagine that AI might have that kind of impact on certain roles where the AI is doing more of it.
So now we have to figure out, well, okay, what does that create for humans? I think we will. I think AI will be seen as a tool, just like robots are a tool, but that remains to be seen.
John Koetsier:
I think there’s so much undone work that there’s room for all kinds of labor, whether that’s digital, whether that’s robotic.
If we think about the customer service level of most of the large corporations, is it good? Right? It’s not. Do we handle customers incredibly well? Not very often, right? Yeah. Do we do every job around our towns and cities for maintenance, for bridges, for roads, for everything, infrastructure that we should?
Do we have all the environmental reclamation projects running that we should? There is so much undone labor right now that if we decrease the cost of labor, we ought to be able to do more, and therefore increase the amount of overall work, and hopefully the number of overall jobs as well.
That’s my hope.
Jeff Burnstein:
Well, I think you may be onto something there. There’s certainly a lot of things that we could do better and need more people to do it. Yep.
John Koetsier:
Let’s hit another thing that you’ve talked about significantly as well, and in fact been involved with legislators on, and that’s a national robotics strategy.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
We’ve talked already about China and 54% of all industrial robots, and we talked about competitiveness. This is geopolitical stuff. This is national power, national wealth stuff. Can you make the things you need? Will they be available? Remember COVID, when you couldn’t get certain things because countries were hoarding things.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
Do you control your means of production? Can you build things better or cheaper, or both, than competitors? All these things are critical to a nation moving forward confidently into the coming century. Talk a little bit about that and robotics.
Jeff Burnstein:
Well, the China story is really fascinating.
I remember, I think it was in the ‘90s, a group of Chinese came to visit us in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and said, “Look, we know we need to automate. We can’t afford this stuff, but we’re going to have to figure it out.” And then they started developing national strategies to figure it out and five-year plans.
And their goal was not just to be the largest user of robotics, which they dwarf the rest of the world now, but they wanted to be the largest supplier. And they’ve succeeded at both because the demand in China is so big. Chinese robots globally, I don’t think, have had the uptake that, for instance, the Japanese have had globally.
But because the Chinese market is so big, they’ve achieved that. But they know, they knew they needed certain parts and components to build this supply chain out, and they’ve done that as well. They were very strategic about this, and they still are.
And so when we went to the U.S. government back in the early ‘80s and said, “Listen, you’re about to lose this industry that was founded in the United States.” The first robot was installed in 1961 by Unimation, a U.S. company. There were 100 or more U.S. companies in robotics in the ’60s and ’70s. But as we go into the ’80s, Japan had a national robotics strategy, and they were supporting the development of these technologies in Japan.
We told the government, “You need to act. You need to incentivize. You need to protect. You need to do whatever you need to do.” And they didn’t listen.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
And so it all went to Japan. We went down to one U.S. robotics company back in the day, Adept Technology. So fast-forward to today, here we are again. We have another chance, especially with new form factors emerging.
Because it’s not just humanoids. There’s autonomous mobile robots, collaborative robots. There’s a whole bunch of new form factors that have emerged since it was just traditional robot arms. So we have another chance, and it’s wide open, especially in humanoids. But the U.S. government has to take action. This is why we’ve been pushing so hard for a national strategy, and we’re very encouraged.
They’re listening. Legislation is being introduced for a National Robotics Commission, which is one of the things we’ve been suggesting.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Burnstein:
But there’s more that needs to be done, and so we hope it happens.
John Koetsier:
Cool. Maybe we’ll end here. There’s lots of different places humanoids can go: the office, maybe; even warehouses, for sure; factories, absolutely; logistics facilities; all that stuff; the farm.
You talked about unfilled labor jobs in manufacturing. The farm labor situation is a disaster as well in a lot of cases. Construction. Labor, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Which is the hardest thing for robotics, obviously, because it’s a chaotic environment. But we’re seeing that as well. Delivery as well.
The home is a massive market, and several American humanoid robotics manufacturers are targeting home. Would you have one in your home?
Jeff Burnstein:
I have a hard time seeing it. I really do. And here’s why. There was a great debate back in the ’90s between Joe Engelberger and Colin Angle, who was at that point just starting Roomba with iRobot.
John Koetsier:
Yeah.
Jeff Burnstein:
And Joe Engelberger said, “People will pay $50,000 for a home robot that can clean and cook and do all these things. They’ll even remodel their homes, and I know this because they buy cars that cost, you know, BMWs, expensive cars. People will do this.”
Colin Angle said, “They won’t. It’ll have to be a home robot that does something effectively, like the vacuum cleaner we’re working on, and is very affordable, a few hundred dollars.”
Guess what? He was right, and to this day, 30 or more years later, there’s only been one successful type of home robot, and that’s a vacuum cleaner.
John Koetsier:
And now he’s got a new one.
Jeff Burnstein:
Yeah, right.
John Koetsier:
Not a vacuum cleaner. Right. A pet, kind of.
Jeff Burnstein:
Right, he’s got a pet coming. I’m not sold on the pet yet, but we’ll see. But the vacuum cleaner has been the only effective, successful robot in our homes. So now you’re telling me we’re going to have a humanoid doing all these things, and I’m going to say, what does it cost?
Why don’t we just have single-purpose robots doing some of these things? Like, maybe there’s one that just does all the cooking, and another one does the cleaning, and another one helps the elderly people who are still in their homes. But is it going to be one for $20,000, whatever the number is?
John Koetsier:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Burnstein:
It’s not going to just fold laundry. See, that I don’t need. This is why I have trouble with it. I would not buy it to fold laundry. I can fold laundry. I don’t need that.
John Koetsier:
I’m buying one at some point, but we’ll see how it goes and how it works. Thank you so much for this, Jeff. I really appreciate it.