AI-Powered Robotics Set to Unlock US$150 Billion Opportunity as Foundation Models Transform Automation

Robotics foundation models are poised to transform the automation landscape, creating a global market worth US$150 billion by 2036 as advances in Physical AI enable robots to perform increasingly complex, adaptable tasks that have long resisted automation. According to a new report from global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, the technology is moving beyond traditional industrial robotics, opening new opportunities across manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, healthcare, retail, hospitality, restaurants, and other labor-intensive industries where robots can learn, reason, and manipulate varied and deformable objects with unprecedented robustness.

“Robotics foundation models represent a major shift in what enterprises can realistically automate,” said George Chowdhury, principal analyst at ABI Research. “As these models improve generalization and enable robots to handle more variable tasks, they will open new revenue opportunities across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, retail, hospitality, and eventually the home.”

ABI Research expects manufacturing to remain the leading near-term opportunity, reaching a US$30 billion TAM by 2036, while warehousing and logistics will account for US$21 billion and healthcare will reach US$16 billion. Restaurants, retail, and hospitality together will represent a further US$27 billion as businesses seek to reduce labor costs and improve operational flexibility with more capable robotic systems.

The market’s growth will depend not only on model innovation, but also on the supporting ecosystem around training, orchestration, and edge deployment. NVIDIA currently leads in on-device robotics compute with Jetson, while cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are positioned to support model training, simulation, and lifecycle management. Meanwhile, competitors such as Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Ambarella are building alternative hardware and software stacks for edge deployment.

“Commercial adoption will accelerate first in environments where safety, repeatability, and ROI can be proven most clearly,” Chowdhury said. “That is why collaborative robots and industrial deployments will lead the market before broader expansion into dynamic public environments and domestic use, with lessons from automotive autonomy playing an important role in shaping safety, liability, and deployment frameworks.

“While foundation models are a pivotal technology for enabling humanoid robots, all robot form factors will benefit from the technology including mobile robots, drones, and so-called mobile manipulators—many of these robots will utilize foundation models in the same way that ADAS is used within automotive markets. However, robotics models have the potential to leap-frog automotive in terms of deployment scale due to the large number of controlled environments in which they can deliver ROI.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Physical AI: Robotics Foundation Models report, part of the company’s Industrial, Collaborative & Commercial Robotics research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights.