Iván Hernández Dalas: Beyond the robot: Shaping the future of autonomous operations
The ANYmal gas-leak and presence-detection robot is an example of where autonomous operations are going. Source: ANYbotics
Last month, my team and I welcomed over 70 customers, partners, and industry leaders to our ANYbotics Industry Forum, or AIF, 2025. We spend a huge amount of time in the field, working side by side with our customers at their industrial plants, so bringing everyone together in one place for two days of intense, high-quality conversation allowed them to connect the dots around autonomous systems on a completely different level.
For me, it crystallized a fundamental shift. In the first years of robotic inspection, the conversations were all about mobility and autonomy: Can the robot navigate our plant?
Now, the conversation has fundamentally changed. It’s about moving beyond the robot to data insights, workflow integration, and the intelligence derived from the robot‘s work, and, just as importantly, about the acceptance and collaboration required to bring people and robots together effectively.
The discussions we had during AIF happened against a critical backdrop that everyone in the room recognized: a growing skills gap, a retiring workforce, aging infrastructure, and a lack of connected insights to make informed, asset-level decisions.
It was inspiring to hear success stories directly from companies like Equinor, Constellium, Vigier Cement, and Titan about their robot deployments, learnings, and the real-world impact they are already seeing.
A powerful example came from a customer in the metals industry who uses one of ANYbotics’ ANYmal robots for thermal inspections to detect overheating equipment, preventing costly furnace failures. It showed how it scaled their operation from initial deployment to full adoption in just a few months, now running 18 automated missions every single day.
The impact is clear: The company is minimizing safety risks for its team and is on track to save over $1 million by avoiding downtime. This is what it looks like when robotics moves from a concept to a core part of the operation.
From these conversations, I left with three takeaways that define the next phase of our industry.
1. Autonomous systems usher in the age of Industry 5.0
We are no longer just talking about Industry 4.0‘s digitalization and automation. The conversations at AIF 2025 were firmly centered on Industry 5.0 — the integration of human ingenuity with advanced, intelligent technologies.
This marks a shift to a human-centric focus, putting worker well-being at the core. It’s about creating a collaborative environment where humans focus on contextual understanding and critical decision-making, while robots take over the repetitive, dull, and risk-exposed tasks with precision and high frequency.
This new, collaborative model naturally raises questions about the human role. While the common narrative is that workers might see robots as a threat to their daily work, the reality we’re seeing on the ground is far more nuanced.
Workers are not rejecting robots, but they are negotiating what it means to work with them. There is pride in mastering advanced tools, but also anxiety around losing craftsmanship and identity. As Zac Kimbrough from Constellium perfectly put it during his talk, “People are the biggest danger to my robots.”
His remark captures the essence of this transition. Collaboration is not just about machines fitting into daily operations, but also about humans learning to adapt their own behaviors, expectations, and sense of purpose.
And this is where the real challenge lies. It’s not man versus machine; it’s the organizational learning, the redefined workflows, and the mindset shift required to understand how people and robots can best work together. Ultimately, the companies that master this human-robot collaboration will be the ones who succeed.
2. The value is in the intelligence, not the data
My second takeaway centers on redefining value. One of the major challenges for any new technology is how to quantify and prove the long-term benefits.
Compared with a traditional robot arm, where the work is easily measured in objects lifted, the business case for an inspection robot like ANYmal is more sophisticated. The robot‘s movement doesn’t provide the value; the value comes from the frequent, precise, and remotely accessible data it produces.
This data, in turn, leads to critical secondary benefits, such as increased safety, higher plant integrity, and improved operational performance.
But more data doesn’t provide value on its own. We heard clearly that simply adding more fixed sensors everywhere doesn’t solve the core problem. Many manufacturing plants are already drowning in data. The challenge is the quality of that data and the ability to generate meaningful conclusions from it.
This is where we’re seeing a paradigm shift. A mobile platform like ANYmal delivers high-quality, rich, and contextual data far more cost-efficiently than a dense network of fixed sensors. This is already changing asset management strategies. We’re hearing from companies that are stripping out redundant sensors, replacing them with mobile robots to focus on data quality over quantity.
Even more profound, new plants are being designed from the ground up with only the most crucial fixed sensors, building the capabilities of mobile robotics into the asset strategy from Day 1.
It’s this high-quality, contextualized data that unlocks the “aha” moment. It’s what allows us to move up the chain from data, to insights, to intelligence, and ultimately, to action. This is how we perform root-cause analysis and move from reactive to truly predictive maintenance.
3. The autonomous future is a shared ecosystem
This leads to my final point: The challenges the inspection industry faces are too big for any one company to solve alone, so we need partnerships. Going beyond the robot, robotics developers like ANYbotics need to deliver a key piece that fits directly into our customers’ broader digital operations.
For example, early results in proof-of-concept applications of SAP’s robotics initiative, Project Embodied AI, demonstrated up to 50% reductions in unplanned downtime. The project also showed up to 25% improvement in productivity and significant reductions in operational errors across manufacturing, warehouse automation, and quality inspection.
ANYbotics provides a full-stack autonomous solution for SAP users that combines ANYmal robotics with inspection intelligence. Users begin to see real value when they can integrate the continuous flow from their robots with SAP to make their operations not only autonomous but also truly intelligent, where issues are predicted, understood, and prevented before they affect production. There are numerous other examples.
While each of us focuses on our own lane, there is a vibrant and growing ecosystem that provides many more. It is where these lanes intersect that the vision of truly autonomous inspection becomes a reality.
ANYbotics charts shared path forward
Heading into 2026, I am more convinced than ever that the future is not just about autonomous robots. It’s about building autonomous, intelligent operations.
This is a shared journey. So, how does “beyond the robot” look for ANYbotics in 2026?
For me, it means an unwavering commitment to delivering more value by continuously expanding use cases, integrating new sensors, and strengthening our software integrations. It means pushing the frontiers of reliability and safety standards to ensure our robots are the most trusted tools in your plant. Above all, it means deepening our collaboration with all of you, the pioneers who are making this a reality.
About the author
Peter Fankhauser is co-founder and CEO of ANYbotics, a global leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) using artificial intelligence for industrial inspections. He has a doctorate from ETH Zurich and 15 years of experience in robotics.
ANYbotics said it tackles critical industry challenges in safety, efficiency, and sustainability. It designed its ANYmal robots for advanced mobility and real-time data collection, making them suitable for tasks such as routine inspections, remote operations, or predictive maintenance.
With hundreds of customers in energy, power, metals, mining, and chemicals worldwide, ANYbotics claimed that its systems address labor shortages and keep workers out of harm’s way. Founded in 2009, the company has raised more than $150 million in funding and employs 200 experts. It has offices in Zurich and San Francisco.
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