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Editor’s Note: When some of the biggest names building frontier AI called for slowing things down – sending AI stocks lower – my colleague Luke Lango was at the All-In Summit, hearing firsthand from those investing billions in AI development.
And he came away more bullish about where the AI Boom goes from here.
In today’s Smart Money, he explains why – and how robotics could be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI’s next phase.
Luke recently recommended a young private robotics company that he believes is particularly well-positioned. It’s accepting investments starting at $500 through tomorrow, September 21. You can get the company’s name and Luke’s full investment case in his .
First, here’s Luke with what he saw and heard at All-In.
I just spent two days at the All-In Summit listening to some of the most powerful people in technology talk about artificial intelligence at a pretty extraordinary moment.
On Monday morning alone, I heard from Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang. I was sitting there when , and the conversation went on speakers for everyone in the room to hear. Elon Musk appeared later that day.
So, yes, it was quite a time to be in that room.
Especially after what had happened just days earlier. Some of the biggest names building frontier AI had begun calling for a deliberate slowdown in the development of increasingly powerful models. AI stocks got hammered as investors tried to figure out what that could mean for the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into chips, data centers, power plants, and everything else supporting the AI buildout.
But at All-In, I didn’t hear much talk about slowing down.
I paid particular attention to Nadella. Microsoft is one of the companies writing the biggest checks in the AI Boom.
And the check writer didn’t say anything about writing fewer checks. I didn’t hear anything about cutting AI spending, reducing infrastructure commitments, or backing away from new data centers.
That matters because the slowdown everyone is talking about is primarily about the “frontier” – training the next generation of increasingly powerful AI models. That’s only one part of the AI economy.
Running AI for customers, testing AI, and training robots all will still require a lot more data centers full of compute. So I don’t look at this debate and conclude that the infrastructure spending cycle is over. There is still a pathway to years of growth.
In fact, as a long-term investor, I came away from All-In more bullish about how long this AI Boom could last.
My concern has never been this quarter’s earnings or next quarter’s earnings. I care about what happens two or three years from now. What happens if companies build too much capacity too quickly? What happens if a serious AI safety problem scares the public? What happens if regulators come down with a hammer?
Slowing down at the frontier could reduce some of those risks. We may give up some speed in the short term, but I think the industry has an opportunity to make this boom more durable over the long run.
And for investors, that could shift some of the biggest opportunities toward companies finding valuable new ways to put AI to work.
I recently recommended one young private robotics company pursuing exactly that opportunity. I’ll tell you more about it in a moment. But first, another robotics company gives us a good look at what it takes to turn an impressive machine into something customers will actually pay for.
What Robotics Can Teach Us About Dependable AI
An AI-powered robot working on a warehouse floor doesn’t have to contemplate the fate of humanity, but it does have to recognize the guy who accidentally steps into its path and stop before it runs him over.
That may sound straightforward, but making it happen reliably around people who aren’t following a carefully rehearsed demonstration is a major engineering challenge.
A machine might handle a container perfectly when the aisle is empty. A real warehouse has people moving around, awkwardly placed pallets, changing conditions, and shifts that need to stay on schedule.
And that turns AI safety into a business problem. It may be something that keeps you up at night when the conversation turns to superintelligence. But for a warehouse owner, AI safety is a line item.
A warehouse operator can love your technology and still have very good reasons to hold off on buying it.
That’s what caught my attention about Agility Robotics’ new Digit 5.
its humanoid robot can lift 50 pounds, reach to heights of 7.2 feet, and operate for more than 20 hours a day, with rapid recharging between stretches of work. It also has an independent safety controller monitoring what’s happening around the robot. If someone gets too close, Digit can avoid them, stop, or sit down.
That doesn’t resolve the broader debate over AI’s risks, but it does illustrate how addressing a safety problem can help move the technology forward.
Think about that from an investment perspective. Teaching a robot when to stop – making it safer and more dependable – could help a company sell more robots and get them deployed more quickly.
For a robotics company, the distance between an impressive demonstration and a repeat customer can be enormous. I want to see whether that robot can do useful work for an entire shift, how often an employee has to intervene, what it costs to keep running, and whether the customer comes back for more.
Agility says the previous generation of Digit logged more than 65,000 hours with customers. That’s experience with actual operating conditions, actual customer requirements, and actual problems to fix.
Digit 5 still has to deliver, though. Early access is expected in the first half of 2027. And the comes from one unnamed customer and depends on hitting milestones. Those orders aren’t guaranteed revenue, so we still need to see execution.
I want to see conditional demand turn into deliveries, productive use, and repeat orders. That will tell us much more about the business than a video of a robot completing one difficult task
Teaching Robots to Learn
Safety is only one part of making robots useful in the real world. They also need to learn new jobs without an engineering team spending weeks programming every movement.
Across the industry, vision-language-action models, or VLAs, are helping developers address these challenges. Put simply, these systems connect what a robot sees with an instruction and the actions needed to carry it out.
Developers can also train robots in simulated environments, letting them practice over and over under different conditions before testing what they’ve learned on a physical machine. But there are still gaps between simulation and reality. A successful virtual run doesn’t prove the physical machine will perform reliably in the messy real world.
For investors, I think the important question is whether that training produces a machine customers can deploy with less setup and less supervision.
If every new installation requires an engineering team to spend weeks adapting the product, expansion could become expensive. A company that can reduce that burden may have a better chance of growing profitably.
And that brings me to a young private company I recently recommended.
It started in food-service robotics. Its robot servers are already working in real commercial locations, and I’ve visited one of those locations myself to see the technology in action.
But what really caught my attention was what the company has been building behind that business.
Think of it as a training academy for robots. The company has developed technology that uses human demonstrations to teach robots new physical skills. The idea is pretty intuitive: You show the robot how to perform a task, it learns from the demonstration, and it gets better with practice.
The company says it can teach a robot some new hands-on tasks in as little as 30 minutes, without an engineer programming every movement.
Food service gives the company a place to train its technology every day, in front of real customers, with all the little complications that come with the physical world. But I think the opportunity will stretch much further. The same approach could be used to teach robots to handle products in a warehouse, work with equipment in a factory, or perform other complicated physical tasks.
Now we’re talking about a much bigger potential market.
What I Want to See Before a Company Scales
This is how I’m thinking about young robotics companies: Can they turn one successful installation into many without letting service costs swallow the gains?
A customer expanding from one location to several would be an encouraging sign. So would a machine completing more work with fewer interruptions.
I also want to know whether the company can support those additional customers without hiring people faster than it grows revenue. Selling more robots and building a profitable robotics business are separate accomplishments.
Those are some of the questions I brought to the private robotics company I recently recommended. It’s still young. There are real risks here, and plenty the company still has to prove. But I believe its combination of an operating food-service business and technology for teaching robots new skills makes it worth a much closer look.
Whenever I evaluate a young private company like this, I put extra weight on three things: the People building it, the Product they’ve created, and the Timing of the opportunity. I call it my PPT framework.
During my free , I’ll show you the team behind this company (the People), how its robot-training technology works (the Product), the financials and risks, and why I think the Timing is especially interesting as AI moves off our screens and into the physical world.
For a limited time, it is accepting new investors with a minimum investment of $500. The offering is scheduled to close to new investors at midnight on Monday, September 21.
If you’ve spent your investing life buying stocks through a brokerage account, investing in a private company may be unfamiliar territory. So, during that event, I’ll explain how it works, what you’re actually buying, and what I think you should understand before deciding whether an opportunity like this belongs in your portfolio.
You’ve seen what Agility is doing to make robots safer and more useful. Now I want to show you the private company I’ve recommended – and why I think its approach to teaching robots could open up a much larger opportunity.
Sincerely,
Luke Lango
Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace
P.S. Luke picked one heck of a week to attend the All-In Summit. He heard directly from Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk as Wall Street wrestled with the AI slowdown. Luke came away more bullish about the AI Boom – and particularly interested in where the next wave of money could flow. His free event shows you one young private robotics company he believes could benefit.
