500 robots for 10,000 workers: How AI will manage the factories of the future
The world population has exceeded 8 billion, but this statistic does not represent a highly available workforce for the future. On the contrary, in a world that is struggling with climate change and increasing drought and famine, robots are increasingly moving to the main stage, thanks to critical advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, gave a small glimpse of an aggressively developing market in an X post in July 2024: The rise of the robots. In his post, Mostaque said that China is going to be the first nation to have 1 billion robots, already building up an AI-powered workforce, while many are still trying to grasp the innovations brought by AI in daily life. Elon Musk added his thoughts by saying, “The future will have far more robots than people.”
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) revealed the primary purpose of the robots to be built in a guide published in November 2023, stating that mass production of humanoid robots will begin in 2025, mainly to be put to use in 10 primary sectors, stated as production, agriculture, architecture, logistics, energy, health, daycare for the elderly, commercial social services, emergency, and advanced environment applications.
The preparations paid off, and China left competitors in the dust in the humanoid robot market in 2025, representing over 80% of the installations worldwide (for a total of 16,000), according to research company Counterpoint Research, with Chinese startups including AgiBot and Unitree Robotics taking the lead in installations. Another Chinese robotics startup, UBTech, announced in January that it has sealed an agreement with Airbus to produce supply robots for the aviation industry, according to Reuters (Airbus says the collaboration is in an early-stage testing phase). UBTech reached an agreement with U.S. semiconductor producer Texas Instruments last year, pointing to the rapid growth of global collaborations in robotics. With a total humanoid robot order value of over 1.4 billion yuan (around €170 million), production capacity is expected to surpass 10,000 units in 2026, giving a glimpse of the growth of Chinese robotics startups.
Open-source community for humanoid robots
Not only have Chinese startups entered the radar of major brands. Mercedes-Benz announced a partnership with U.S.-based Apptronik in March 2025 and trained a group of “Apollo” robots remotely for specific tasks, Reuters reported. The robots were put to the test at the Digital Factory Campus of Mercedes-Benz in Marienfelde, Berlin, and Kecskemét, Hungary, to be deployed in other facilities in the future, the German brand said.
All these developments point to a new phase in the well-planned and gradually expanding dominance of China in critical industries, while top global brands help push innovations worldwide. Yet, after knocking down the majority of North American and European companies in the electric vehicle (EV) industry, Beijing is also preparing to dominate the autonomous vehicle (AV) market in the coming years, following breakthrough developments in several tech areas.
Two weeks ago, MIIT announced targeted breakthroughs to support development in the AI industry, including training chips and heterogeneous computing, according to the South China Morning Post. Along with innovations such as setting industry standards and open-source initiatives, SCMP says that China would also build an open-source community for humanoid robots. Additionally, China plans to fast-track 6G research in communications, as well as intensify growth in next-generation optical communications and quantum computing.
Does the manufacturing industry benefit from AI more than others?
While robots are the rising superstars, the code that makes our world revolve is becoming more widespread and advanced. According to a July 2025 survey by KPMG across 183 AI manufacturing leaders in eight countries, 77% of manufacturers seek to increase their AI investments in 2026. Company-tailored AI software solutions do not directly lead to higher profits, as shown in past studies (an MIT study last year showed that only 5% of AI pilot programs provide quick revenue gains), yet there are examples where AI works effectively.
One example involves single-use contact lens manufacturer Bausch + Lomb, which deployed AI-powered predictive maintenance software produced by Arena AI, helping workers monitor, test, and fix technical issues, significantly supporting increased demand. Spot & Tango, which delivers fresh dog food, deployed an AI agent produced by Didero that boosted production without hiring new employees by manually coordinating raw materials. In another example cited by Business Insider, FranklinWH Energy Storage deployed AI-based visual inspection to monitor the production of lithium iron phosphate home batteries, removing the need for manual inspection.
AI-flavoured challenges
As in the AI revolution, the robotics market is booming, and expectations are high. But initial feedback from one of the industry experts draws a challenging picture, reminiscent of expansion phases in the AI industry.
Speaking to the Financial Times (FT), the chief brand officer of UBTech (a future potential ally of Airbus), Michael Tam, said that “their Walker S2 robots are 30 to 50% as productive as humans.” Additionally, their functions are limited, such as box stacking and quality checks.
Humanoid robots bring a highly complex set of challenges, analysts told FT, including the high number of movable joints engaged in tasks that require advanced decision-making. Yet orders are piling up, Tam says, stating that companies are afraid of lagging behind in competition.
As for performance, UBTech aims to increase the performance of its robots to 80% by 2027.
Complementing tech for robotics
From 6G research to robotics and AVs, 2027 may appear to be the breaking point for world-leading countries in terms of technology, drawing solid lines in their expertise and applications. For China, humanoids represent a large portion of this breakthrough, yet there will be several critical advancements in multiple areas. CEO and co-founder of AI startup GREÏ, Giedrė Rajuncė, listed five for Automation News:
Agentic AI systems replace dashboards with action: Instead of just showing analytics on a dashboard, AI agents will take real operational actions across processes, such as opening work orders, coordinating vendors, or triggering maintenance, with minimal human involvement.
Physical AI and industrial robotics move to orchestration: AI is no longer only software and is moving into the physical world, says Rajuncė, increasingly orchestrating real-world robotics across entire operations. That means rule-based robots, learned behaviours, and context-aware robots working together in dynamic environments.
Domain-specific AI models overtake generic generative AI: Generic large language models (LLMs) aren’t enough for complex industrial environments. Industry-specific AI models that understand manufacturing rules, safety constraints, assets, and domain language will outperform generalised AI systems, especially in high-stakes physical contexts.
Multimodal AI unlocks real-time operational intelligence: AI systems that combine text, vision, video, audio, sensor, and telemetry data simultaneously will become mainstream. This enables better real-time situational awareness—for instance, correlating visual defect detection with vibration and thermal data to uncover the root cause of equipment anomalies.
Predictive maintenance and frontline usability become decisive: AI-driven predictive maintenance will continue delivering clear cost reductions (for example, up to around 40% less than old preventive schedules), but success also depends heavily on usability for frontline workers. AI must explain why it recommends actions so workers trust and act on them confidently.
What are the prospects for 2050?
The number of humanoid robots has been increasing rapidly since 2020. The Chinese robotics market installed over 243,000 robots in 2021, up 44% from 2020, becoming the fifth most automated country that year, leaving Chinese Taipei, the U.S., Hong Kong, and Sweden behind, according to The Robot Report. That same year, China had an average of 322 robots for every 10,000 employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The target for 2025 was 500 robots per 10,000 employees, representing only half of the robot density in South Korea, The Robot Report says.
If dystopian climate change scenarios do not interrupt the mechanical growth of humanity in the coming years, Morgan Stanley expects the humanoid robot market to surpass $5 trillion by 2050, with around 1 billion robots, 90% of them deployed for industrial and commercial purposes.
If China is aiming to exceed 1 billion robots, as Mostaque forecasted, it would not be wrong to think that there will be over a billion robots worldwide by 2050, fundamentally changing the world as we know it.
Shall AI move to the central position of the tech evolution?
AI startups, agents, open-source platforms, newcomer developers, ideas, and millions of robots, should a mechanism be fixed beneath this picture to make it work seamlessly? And can it be created?
Recent research suggests that AI is moving beyond isolated tools and dashboards toward becoming the central coordinating layer of industrial systems. A 2025 study published on arXiv argues that future factories will require AI to function as an orchestration layer sitting above machines, robots, sensors, and industrial software. Instead of optimising individual tasks in isolation, AI systems are expected to continuously observe physical processes, reason about factory-level objectives such as uptime, safety, and energy efficiency, and execute actions across multiple systems in real time.
The research frames this shift as embodied intelligence, AI that is tightly coupled with physical systems rather than detached analytical software. This orchestration-based approach is presented as a prerequisite for scaling advanced automation, including humanoid robots and autonomous machines, beyond pilot projects. As factories grow more complex, fragmented intelligence becomes a bottleneck; centrally orchestrated AI enables production environments to evolve from reactive optimisation toward self-managing operations, reinforcing AI’s emerging role at the core of technological evolution.
The question is no longer whether AI will run factories, but what new roles humans will have in future.
Sources:
Mostaque, E. (2024). The rise of the robots [Post]. X. https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1811005851185848641
Musk, E. (2024). The future will have far more robots than people [Post]. X. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1811047170805748054
Counterpoint Research. (2025). Chinese firms dominate global humanoid robot shipments in 2025. Bloomberg.
International Federation of Robotics. (2022). World robotics report. https://ifr.org
KPMG. (2025). AI in manufacturing survey.
Morgan Stanley. (2024). Humanoid robot market could reach $5 trillion by 2050. https://www.morganstanley.com
Rajuncė, G. (2026). Five industrial AI trends that will matter in 2026. Automation News. https://automationnews.com
Reuters. (2025). Mercedes-Benz tests humanoid robots with Apptronik. https://www.reuters.com
Reuters. (2025). UBTech signs agreement with Airbus.
South China Morning Post. (2025). Beijing outlines AI and 6G push. https://www.scmp.com
Yantra AI Research Group. (2025). Embodied intelligence for industrial orchestration (arXiv:2512.15758). https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15758
If AI becomes the central orchestrator of factories, what should humans focus on next: supervision, creativity, or entirely new roles?
The AI evolution will provide the answers, but it is vital for companies to set their AI strategies early, before they are lost in the midst of competition.
Looking ahead
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