I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but things of a workforce nature are in flux, and not in a good way. Currently, the US population is estimated to be around 342 million people, give or take. Of these, about 170 million are either in the civilian labor force or actively looking for work. One problem is that the average age of the population is rising and more people are retiring, resulting in fewer workers being available to fill essential jobs.

On the bright side (or the scary side, depending on your point of view), robotics is advancing at a breathtaking pace. Industrial robots are becoming smarter, cheaper, and more capable, while the latest generation of AI-powered humanoids is beginning to move from research laboratories into factories, warehouses, hospitals, and distribution centers. 

Although nobody knows exactly how quickly this transition will unfold, one thing seems increasingly clear: societies with aging populations and shrinking workforces are likely to embrace robots not simply because they can, but because they must. The bottom line is that robots will increasingly augment—and in some cases replace—human labor.

There are currently fewer than half a million industrial robots operating in US factories, but this figure tells only part of the story. Warehouse robots, autonomous mobile robots, agricultural machines, delivery robots, cleaning robots, and the first wave of AI-powered humanoids are all beginning to enter the workforce. In mid-2025, for example, Amazon announced that it had deployed its 1,000,000th robot across its global operations network. These robots aren’t replacing everyone (at least, not yet), but they are taking on an ever-growing share of the lifting, carrying, sorting, and packing, leaving humans to perform tasks that still require dexterity, judgment, and problem-solving (hurray for us!).

The point is that the number and variety of working robots is growing rapidly, and most analysts expect this growth to accelerate dramatically over the coming decade. Some people are especially bullish about this. For example, I was just chatting with John Fowler, who is the CEO of MBody AI. John told me he strongly believes that, over the next 5 to 10 years, there’ll be more robot workers than human workers in America.

As an aside (you knew one was coming), John is an interesting character. As he says, he started off by making some very bad life choices, resulting in him ending up with a law degree (“it was a dark time,” he told me). When one of John’s clients had the opportunity to take his company public, he invited John to be the CEO. In a little over five years, they took the company from a couple of employees to over 1,000, and from $0 to a valuation of almost $1 billion.

When they finally sold the company, John did what many of us would like to do… he bought a farm and spent the next five years writing articles, consulting, and driving a tractor on the weekends. But you can only do that sort of thing for so long before you begin to get bored, at which point you start looking for something else to do. In John’s case, he was interested in all aspects of AI, so when he was introduced to the founding team at the fledgling MBody AI, he jumped at their offer for him to become the company’s CEO and guide them to greatness. 

In a crunchy nutshell, MBody AI is a US-based software, robotics, and automation company with a mission to help organizations deploy robots and Al into real-world operations. They’re manufacturer-agnostic—they support multiple robots from multiple manufacturers—and they already have 110+ deployments across a wide range of industries, including a Fortune 500 gaming company with multiple casinos.

This sounds impressive when I say it quickly while gesticulating furiously (I needed the exercise), but what does it actually mean? I’m so glad you asked, thereby providing me with an excuse to expound, explicate, and elucidate, so sit down, make yourself comfortable, and I’ll begin.

The problem isn’t that robots don’t exist. Quite the opposite. There are now robots that can scrub floors, vacuum carpets, deliver room service, patrol buildings, transport supplies, inspect equipment, and perform countless other specialized tasks. The problem is that each robot manufacturer naturally concentrates on making its own machine as good as possible. One company builds excellent cleaning robots. Another specializes in delivery robots. A third focuses on security. From the customer’s point of view, however, the question isn’t, “Which is the best cleaning robot?” Rather, it’s, “How do I build and manage an entire robotic workforce?”

This is the gap MBody AI is addressing. Rather than manufacturing robots itself, the company is completely robot-agnostic. Its engineers begin by understanding the customer’s business, identifying repetitive tasks that could benefit from automation, and then selecting whichever robots—potentially from several different manufacturers—are best suited to each job. If an ideal robot doesn’t appear in MBody AI’s portfolio, the team will happily go out and evaluate additional candidates until they find an appropriate solution.

That’s only half the story, however. Bringing in a bunch of robots is relatively easy. Getting them all to work together efficiently is an entirely different proposition. A hotel, casino, hospital, warehouse, or manufacturing plant doesn’t want half a dozen different dashboards, service contracts, software packages, and maintenance organizations. It wants one system, one point of contact, and one organization that takes responsibility for the entire robotic operation. That’s exactly what MBody AI provides. The company procures the robots, deploys them, maintains them, monitors them, and wraps everything inside its AI-powered Orchestrator software, which acts rather like the operations manager for a digital workforce.

One platform. An entire robotic workforce (Source: me and ChatGPT)

Imagine hiring a group of brilliant new employees. Left to their own devices, irrespective of how clever they are, they may still struggle because they don’t yet understand how your business operates. MBody AI’s Orchestrator captures that operational knowledge—the building layout, working hours, restricted areas, charging schedules, workflow priorities, and countless other details—and continuously refines this knowledge base using telemetry from every robot in the fleet. When a new robot arrives, it doesn’t have to start learning from scratch. Instead, it immediately benefits from everything the existing fleet has already learned. Better still, the software continues learning over time, recognizing recurring patterns such as breakfast rushes, holiday weekends, special events, or seasonal peaks so that robots are charged, positioned, and dispatched before demand occurs rather than simply reacting after the fact.

One example John described illustrates the company’s philosophy perfectly. A customer asked whether robots could automate the cleaning of a large parking garage. Finding suitable floor-cleaning robots wasn’t difficult. The unexpected challenge was that the garage lacked a convenient water supply. Rather than abandoning the project, the folks at MBody AI simply added another robot whose job was to transport water and service the cleaning machines. Once that solution had been developed, it immediately became available to other customers with similar facilities. That’s one of the nice things about being manufacturer-independent: the company isn’t trying to sell a particular robot. It’s trying to solve their customers’ problems.

From the customer’s perspective, this may be the most attractive aspect of the whole proposition. They don’t have to become robotics experts. They don’t have to worry about which manufacturer to choose, how different robots will communicate, who maintains them, or how to schedule and coordinate them. MBody AI handles all of that. The customer simply gets the business outcome. The result, according to John, can be dramatic, with labor-related costs reduced by more than 80% and a typical breakeven period of less than four months. 

Once customers see these economics in action, it’s easy to understand why they often begin by deploying one class of robot and then quickly expand into additional applications. Those floor-cleaning robots are soon joined by delivery robots, security robots, hospitality robots, and whatever else makes business sense. The software orchestration layer scales right along with them.

The more I think about this, the more I like MBody AI’s business model. Building world-class robots is extraordinarily difficult and enormously expensive. Every manufacturer is betting that its particular design—whether it’s a floor scrubber, a delivery robot, or eventually a humanoid—will come out on top. The chaps and chapesses at MBody AI don’t have to make that bet. As better robots continue to appear, the company simply incorporates them into its growing ecosystem. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer industry, when the biggest winners weren’t always the companies making the hardware, but the companies providing the software layer that made all that hardware work together (can you spell “Microsoft”?).

As a final thought, this column focused on robots in the workforce. In the longer term, perhaps the biggest opportunity of all may lie inside our own homes. As AI-powered humanoid robots become more capable and affordable, they could help with everyday chores like carrying groceries, loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, and fetching items from around the house. More importantly, they could enable millions of older people to remain living independently for longer (something that becomes increasingly relevant to your humble narrator as the years fly by). With America’s population continuing to age and demand for caregivers already exceeding supply in many areas, domestic robots may become less of a novelty and more of a necessity… but we’ll leave that as a topic for another day.