Physical AI Is Ready. Your Building Isn't. | Kateryna Portmann on TechDrive Zurich

When Kateryna Portmann was a kid in Ukraine, she asked her parents for a robot every time they travelled. They could never find one, so she got dolls instead. She works in robotics now, as Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, and she runs the Women in Robotics Society.
Her route there was not a straight line: international business, an executive MBA, consulting, a PhD in Hong Kong she could not finish, then a startup where a language barrier pushed her towards numbers and into product management. She landed in robotics in 2019, for a reason that never shows up on a CV. Her sister has cerebral palsy and used neurorehabilitation devices, which is how she found the company that made them.
The core of this conversation is what actually breaks a robot deployment. Assume the robot works perfectly. It has been simulated, tested and deployed correctly. Then people leave a ladder in the corridor, prop open the door that has to stay shut, and walk the stairs while the robot is on them. The machine is rarely the hard part. The building, the workflows and the people are.

In this episode:
• Why the robot is usually the easy part of a deployment
• Nobody wants another interface, and what that means for integration
• Robot ready, facility ready, organisation ready, and why all three have to line up
• The gap between three robots and a hundred, and why most pilots never cross it
• Why almost nobody has twenty years of mobile robotics experience, and why that helps
• Compliance running behind the technology, and building safe by design anyway
• Moving from brownfield sites today to greenfield in three to five years
• How to get into robotics now, and what these companies are actually hiring for
• Serving a population that is half women with teams that are twenty to thirty percent

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About the guest: Kateryna Portmann is Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, working on robots for hazardous zones and critical infrastructure, and runs the Women in Robotics Society. She was previously at Hocoma in neurorehabilitation robotics.

About the show: TechDrive Zürich (techdrivezurich.lovable.app) is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.

▶ Watch the video version on YouTube: youtu.be/uvoba2PyXEQ
🔗 Guest: linkedin.com/in/katerynaportmann
🔗 Women in Robotics Society: linkedin.com/company/women-in-robotics-switzer…
🔗 ANYbotics: anybotics.com
🔗 TechDrive Zürich: techdrivezurich.lovable.app
🔗 Hosted by Justinas Mišeikis: linkedin.com/in/justinasmiseikis