Anyone following how procurement teams actually evaluate a first humanoid purchase?

[dorothy_kuma]

@ssantos Can I ask a dumb follow-up - A recurring critique worth taking seriously: a lot of publicly announced 'production capacity' targets (100k units/year, 1 million/year by 2028, etc.) are aspirational manufacturing targets, not confirmed sales or deployment numbers, and the gap between the two has historically been large in hardware industries.

[deborah59]

Can I ask a dumb follow-up - Self-reported deployment and uptime numbers from humanoid companies are inherently hard to independently verify, since there's no standardized, third-party reporting requirement yet - a healthy dose of skepticism toward company press releases is reasonable until independent data catches up.

[mohammed64]

@deborah59 I'd push back on this a bit. The humanoid robot market is estimated at roughly $5.41 billion in 2026, with projections reaching around $50 billion by 2035 (about 28% CAGR) - a genuinely huge projected growth curve, and also exactly the kind of number worth treating with healthy skepticism given how young and unproven the underlying revenue base still is. Self-reported deployment and uptime numbers from humanoid companies are inherently hard to independently verify, since there's no standardized, third-party reporting requirement yet - a healthy dose of skepticism toward company press releases is reasonable until independent data catches up.

[smuller]

@mohammed64 That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit. Pilot-to-contract conversion rate is one of the most important and least publicly available numbers in this industry - a company running many flashy pilots isn't the same as a company converting those pilots into multi-year recurring revenue.

[carol38]

@smuller Follow-up question though - Automotive OEMs becoming the leading early-adopter vertical isn't really about cars specifically - it's about those companies already having structured facilities, existing automation budgets, and risk tolerance for piloting new equipment at scale. Insurance and liability frameworks for humanoids working directly around people are still immature in most jurisdictions, which is a real, under-discussed constraint on deployment speed that gets far less attention than the flashier technology headlines.

[novikova63]

@carol38 I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. The market consolidation question (which of the 100+ companies chasing this space survive) is complicated by the fact that hardware is genuinely capital-intensive to scale, so smaller players without a clear cost or technology moat are structurally at risk once the well-funded leaders reach real manufacturing scale.

[emily.kumar]

@novikova63 +1 to this. Worth adding: Insurance and liability frameworks for humanoids working directly around people are still immature in most jurisdictions, which is a real, under-discussed constraint on deployment speed that gets far less attention than the flashier technology headlines. Anyway, good thread - following for more.