Brett Adcock, founder of humanoid robotics company Figure.ai, doesn’t mince words when it comes to his vision for the future. “We’re not building robots,” he says. “We’re building a new species.” He made this statement at Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco, while speaking to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce; Adcock was elaborating on his plan to redefine human labour—it contributes to half the world’s GDP—through humanoid robots capable of general-purpose work.
The California-based startup launched its latest humanoid robot, Figure 03, for home, commercial, and large-scale use, in October. The new model integrates improved hardware, AI capabilities, and a system built for mass manufacturing. “It’s 90 percent cheaper,” Adcock added.
At Archer, Adcock proved he could integrate hardware and software at scale. Archer’s Midnight aircraft, a piloted four-passenger eVTOL, is now in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification. “The components needed to build an electric aircraft—batteries, electric motors, control software, embedded systems, sensors and structures—are the same things we need to build a humanoid robot,” he explains. “I basically had to go back to school to learn how to build electric aircraft. And now, we’re doing the same thing with humanoid robots.”
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This culture has paid off. “We walked our first robot dynamically around the office in under a year from when we started the company,” Adcock says. “We made a lot of decisions right, some wrong, and then we just revved into version two, then version three.”
Dismissing flashy theatrics, Adcock says, “Everybody’s out there doing open-loop theatrics with robots—dancing, tele-operating. It’s like a movie set. The hardest problem is not manufacturing; it’s intelligence.”
Humanoid robots have 40 joints that can theoretically spin 360 degrees. “The number of states the robot can be in are 360 degrees to the power of 40,” Adcock explains. “You can’t code your way out of this problem. You have to use a neural net to learn those representations.”
Figure.ai’s approach relies on human data. “Our training set for humanoids is an unfair advantage,” Adcock says. “We take human video data—humans walking around an apartment—and we can navigate just from that. We can touch things like humans and grab things. The robot has the same affordances as a human.”
Adcock believes the industry is in a race for intelligence and not manufacturing scale. “Who can solve general robotics? Who can solve human-like intelligence in the physical world? That’s the race,” he says. “We’ll be able to do general-purpose work with a humanoid just through speech and have it do everything you’d want in unseen places, like a home it’s never been in.” Manufacturing will matter, but later. “People ask, ‘How are you going to make a million robots?’ Today, that’s not the issue. The issue is making them work. How do we manufacture at real scale? We’re working on that now.”
Figure.ai’s facility, dubbed ‘Bot HQ’, is preparing for thousands of units. “Everything’s networked,” Adcock says. “We can scan a robot and know every single torque we put on every single bolt.” Long term, Adcock sees exponential growth. “Once one robot knows how to move packages or do your dishes, every robot in the fleet knows this,” he says.
Unlike aviation, robotics faces almost no regulatory hurdles. “There’s no FAA for robots,” Adcock says. “As soon as we can build something intrinsic, we can ship it.” But should there be? “Maybe someday,” he concedes. For now, Figure.ai is focussed on civilian applications. “We won’t do anything militarised.”
Adcock doesn’t shy away from the economic implications. “If you solve this, you’ll build a company worth tens of trillions,” he says. “Half the world’s GDP is human labour. You could deploy almost an infinite amount of synthetic humans.”
Adcock predicts humanoids will outnumber humans in workplaces within a decade. “We have company goals: More humanoids than humans in our office,” he says. “I hope by well before 2045, events like this have more humanoids than humans. They’ll be doing everything.”
His timeline is aggressive. “Sub five to seven years, for sure,” he says. “Next year, we’ll have humanoids doing general-purpose work through speech. In five years, they’ll be everywhere.”
First Published: Nov 11, 2025, 14:47
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