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March 18, 2025

Humanoid robotics is one of the hottest topics in tech, with dozens of startup companies around the world, and billions in new investment.

But investors are still looking for the perfect application, the place where advancements in robotics meets the economic needs of the wider market. 

“There is a big gap, and when I think about deployability, I also think about the cost,” said IEEE Senior Member Ayanna Howard. 

Howard made these comments on the Wall Street Journal’s Bold Names podcast, where Host and Technology Columnist Christopher Mims noted that “Howard has the ears of some of the most powerful people in the U.S. making decisions about the future of AI.”

It is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion that touches on the major advances in the field, the integration of robotics with generative AI, and the current limitations of the technology, including the lack of digital infrastructure to support widespread robotics deployment.

“If you’re connected around an AI in a virtual environment and you don’t have great bandwidth. You just wait a few seconds and your answer comes,” Howard said. “In a robotics world, if you are losing a second of information, you have a robot that falls or hurts someone. And so I think that disconnect of ‘do we have the infrastructure for doing this in orders of less than milliseconds, nanoseconds, and not losing any connectivity, we haven’t really addressed that yet.”

You can listen to or read the full transcript of the podcast here. 

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Ayanna Howard headshot

Ayanna Howard

IEEE Senior Member, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society

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