The $10 Trillion Bet on Humanoid Robots | Figure Founder Brett Adcock

In this talk

1. 1:42

   Building useful robots

   Adcock says Figure is focused on robots doing useful work autonomously, from household tasks to commercial jobs. He argues the field is still early and says the next step is putting hundreds or thousands of robots into daily use, then expanding toward machines that can handle a wide range of human tasks.

2. 4:09

   Manufacturing and deployment

   Figure plans to produce thousands of robots this year, with a longer-term target of one million annually. Adcock describes production growth at its BotQ lines and says the main challenge is getting robots to perform reliably at human-level capability across customer sites. A BMW trial ran for six months and helped shape the company’s second-generation Helix model.

3. 6:30

   Why Figure builds its own technology

   Adcock says Figure designs much of its robot stack in-house, including motors, sensors, structure, joints, and batteries. He says vertical control helps the company manage suppliers, diagnose problems, and improve the product. He connects the company’s founding to his view that humanoid robotics needed faster progress toward practical use.

4. 26:19

   Operational risks and scale

   Adcock says Figure must make robots complete long shifts without failures or human intervention, a capability he says has not yet been demonstrated. He describes faults becoming less frequent across Figure’s successive robot generations, while emphasizing that reliability, affordability, production capacity, autonomous operation, and customer demand all remain challenges. He estimates commercial wages at $30 trillion to $40 trillion annually and argues that automation could support a very large business.

5. 31:24

   The next year’s goals

   Adcock says Figure aims to deploy robots at scale and advance toward general robotics. He describes a goal of a machine that can perceive a new environment, reason about it, and carry out tasks through conversation and visual understanding. He says the coming year and the following one will test whether the company can make that progress.