Speaking at Salesforce's Dreamforce event in September 2026, Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock described his company's humanoid robot development in striking terms, saying Figure is “building a new species” rather than simply building machines, framing the company's ambitions as creating a new order of intelligence rather than a better industrial robot.
Adcock has separately pushed back against humanoid robotics hype on technical grounds, arguing in a recent podcast appearance that the true bottleneck is onboard intelligence rather than hardware manufacturing, while claiming early commercial partners are already seeing real-world ROI, driven by severe labor shortages and annual turnover rates exceeding 100% in some sectors Figure targets.