The Morning Download: Robots Punch in at the Factory

What's up: Selling $50 million penthouses with a little help from AI; Intel’s next-generation chip enters production; Here come the cobots.

Good morning. We have been hearing for some time that physical robots are going to show up in force throughout the economy. They still account for a very small fraction of all work, but there are signs that their presence is beginning to grow, especially in industrial settings.

The technology is evolving in step with AI, which makes them more adept at negotiating movement in a crowded space to picking up objects on a shelf. As the number of robots rises, it has a massive potential impact on the economy, from productivity to jobs.

Here come the cobots. The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. are driving automation adoption and innovation around a new generation of robots, WSJ Tech Columnist Christopher Mims writes. Smaller, smarter, more flexible and less expensive “cobots”—collaborative robots—are bringing automation to more  fabricators. Equipped with sensors to safely navigate human environments, they can cope with more variability than previous industrial robots. He writes:

China has become the de facto manufacturer of the world’s goods, owing not only to its enormous population of engineers, technicians and machinists but also its 2-million-plus army of industrial robots. Now the U.S. is attempting to claw back some of those contracts—a process called “reshoring”—and robots can in some cases quadruple worker output.

“Automation is key to reshoring, plain and simple,” says Greg LeFevre, CEO and president of Raymath, a metal fabrication company based in Troy, Ohio.

Can self-flying planes transform the skies? Advances in technology over past decades have already reduced the number of people needed on the flight deck. Now companies from giant aircraft makers to small startups are looking to reduce that number to zero, WSJ reports. One startup, Reliable Robotics in California, recently signed a $17 million contract with the U.S. Air Force that involves testing autonomous cargo flights.

Pull over, buddy. Federal regulators have opened another investigation into Tesla’s automated driving technology, saying the system known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised) “induced” some cars to run red lights or to turn into oncoming traffic. The probe covers nearly 2.9 million vehicles equipped with the FSD system.

This goes beyond mere automation of repeatable tasks. Dyna Robotics is making a foundation model for manufacturing robots that means they can learn to perform tasks, instead of being programmed. “Today, the startup’s robot can fold dinner towels, but soon, the firm will partner with real-world factories to expand that skill set, says Lindon Gao, the company’s CEO,” Mims writes.

It’s remarkable that a robot can fold a towel. Speaking from personal experience, that is no simple task, drawing on sensing and fine motor skills. What comes next?

Is your company making use of physical robots? Use the links at the end of this email and let us know.

Selling $50 million penthouses with a little help from AI. Ryan Serhant rose to fame on Bravo’s ‘Million Dollar Listing’ television series before founding his own real-estate brokerage in 2020. Now, he’s betting that artificial intelligence could change Manhattan’s real-estate game, WSJ Leadership Institute's Isabelle Bousquette reports.

His company, Serhant Technologies, built a generative AI platform built to automate the administrative tasks that real-estate agents spend up to 80% of their time on. Today, Serhant’s 1,300 licensed agents across 13 states all have access to it.

The specs. It uses Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and APIs to connect to back-end systems and a range of different large language models. So far, the platform automates about 30 different related tasks, helping agents achieve $5 billion in closed sales volume in the first half of 2025, according to Serhant.

Now coming to TV. The platform will be featured on Serhant's Netflix show, “Owning Manhattan.” “So you have venture investors talking about AI and then $50 million penthouses all in the same episode. We’ll see if people like it. I don’t know.”

With OpenAI bringing more of the digital experience – e-commerce, apps – within its chatbot, two Big Tech firms this week announced their own offerings, geared towards enterprises.

Google Thursday introduced a new platform, Gemini Enterprise,  that lets users build and orchestrate AI agents with little to no code required and that pull in data from third-party products including Microsoft, Box and Salesforce.

And now Amazon Web Services has its own collection of AI tools for automating workplace tasks. The platform, called Amazon Quick Suite, has already been deployed to AWS employees, but wider adoption could be a harder sell, with the AWS not exactly a household name among office workers, GeekWire reports.

Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic have hired former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as an adviser, WSJ reports.