Big Ideas 2026: Physical AI and the Industrial Stack

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Dec 25, 2025

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Join Erin Price-Wright, an advocate for industrial revitalization, as she champions a 'factory-first' approach for scalable projects. Ryan McEntush dives into the 'electro-industrial stack', emphasizing the crucial electrified components for future industry. Zabie Elmgren emphasizes the need for multimodal sensing layers to ensure safe autonomy in real-time environments. Lastly, Will Bitsky discusses how messy industrial data will be the game-changer in physical AI, shifting the advantage from compute power to data collection.

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INSIGHT

Factory-First Thinking For Big Projects

Apply assembly-line principles beyond factories to make bespoke industrial work repeatable and scalable.
Erin Price-Wright says modularity, autonomy, and skilled labor turn complex projects into repeatable systems.

ADVICE

Standardize Designs To Scale Facilities

Build standard designs and repeatable IP to speed up large physical projects like data centers and fabs.
Erin Price-Wright urges founders to focus on scaling industrial capacity by reusing designs and processes.

INSIGHT

Electro-Industrial Stack Powers Physical AI

The electro-industrial stack is the set of electrified components (batteries, motors, power electronics, compute) that enable physical AI.
Ryan McEntush argues countries and companies that master this stack will win economically and strategically.

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AI is moving into the physical economy.

In this episode of Big Ideas 2026, we explore what changes when AI leaves the screen and becomes part of factories, construction sites, supply chains, and critical infrastructure. When the product is physical, reliability matters, real-world constraints appear quickly, and the advantage shifts from standalone software to end-to-end systems.

You will hear from Erin Price-Wright on factory-first principles, Ryan McEntush on the electro-industrial stack, Zabie Elmgren on physical observability, and Will Bitsky on why data, not compute, determines who wins.

Together, these ideas define what physical AI really means: not smarter chat, but deployable systems built for the real world, grounded in new operating models, industrial infrastructure, and defensible data collection.