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Erik Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Plus One Robotics. He's been in the industry for more than 30 years, and he also serves on the board of directors of A3 and is a frequent speaker and contributor to public policy and robotics.

Michelle: So, you recently wrote an article for Quality regarding 2026 robotics trends. Can you tell us a little more about your predictions for next year?

Erik: Sure. Well, 2025 has been a fascinating year to watch, right? There's been so much activity on humanoid robots and the sort of software behind them, and just a lot of excitement in the industry.

And 2026 is when we actually start seeing, do these robots actually find their way to the production floor? And do they impact the metrics? Can we in fact meet quality, handling all of the things in your production process. Just deploying a piece of automation, any piece of automation, is a work in progress.

Does it, in fact do it? And if it doesn't, how do you sort of fill in the gaps? I think that's what we're going to see. A lot of, in ’26, is certainly some of that, more broadly, because we're starting to see automation play such a significant role in different pieces of the production floor. There's going to be some shakeout in how you orchestrate all of this.

How do I see the performance of not just a particular machine, but the whole process? And today there's an easy way to do that with labor. You just have your associates, your employees are logging their activities and such, and you've got a shop floor supervisor, and they sort of aggregate all this. And then, if they're fancy, there's a dashboard somewhere.

Well, how do you do that with machinery? The machine is not just going to automatically enunciate for you what it is doing. So, there's work still to be done in instrumenting these machines such that they are, in fact, telling you what they are doing and then packaging that information in a consumable way that is interoperable, or at least, something that other pieces of equipment can also draw from.

And that orchestration piece is not done yet. I haven't seen really successful implementations of this across the board. But it's an imperative. I think we'll see some of that next year.