Abstract

Despite decades of investment in automation, many high-value industrial operations in manufacturing remain largely manual. The limiting factor is no longer hardware – lack of machines or robots – but software. Programming automation of complex tasks is slow, expensive, and dependent on expert and domain specific knowledge.

While AI has been transforming software systems towards higher autonomy, making production environments autonomous is fundamentally harder. Conversational AI can learn through access to massive datasets on the internet, however, there is no such treasure trove or robot data.

This talk will analyze why today’s AI successes in robotics focus on controlled, low-value tasks, and why expectations around humanoids and general-purpose robots remain misaligned with industrial reality. The core challenge is data generation: without systematic ways to capture manufacturing and production data, learning-based robotics cannot scale. And without measures to protect the data and control the learning process, the solutions cannot be trustworthy, nor safe. Our approach to reliable data foundation required for the adoption of AI in robotics will be shared with the audience to open discussions about its benefits, challenges, and opportunities.

Speaker

Megi Mejdrechova
CTO & co-founder of RoboTwin

Active in robotics, automation, and industrial AI for over 10 years, experienced with research, development, and entrepreneurship. In 2021, Megi co-founded the award-winning startup RoboTwin focused on motion imitating robotics and as its CTO she got into the Forbes 30 under 30 list 2025 or into the prestigious EIC Accelerator. RoboTwin helps to automate even there, where it was impossible before, through no-code robotics solution and its main aim is to bring innovation into manufacturing to close the gap between the state-of-the-art technology and industrial reality.

Marc Plogas
The Cloud and IoT Guy RoboTwin

Marc Plogas discovered his passion for technology at the age of six when an Atari sparked his interest in programming. He holds a Master's in Computer Science and spent nearly a decade freelancing as a software, mobile, and test engineer, as well as a solution architect, before joining Microsoft. At Microsoft, he played an instrumental role in pioneering technologies such as Windows Mixed Reality, Desktop Bridge, and WinUI 3, and later advised startups worldwide on optimizing their cloud architectures with a focus on reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and security. Now at RoboTwin, Marc builds reliable cloud and edge IoT backbones for no‑code robot teaching and continues to deliver talks and workshops on IoT, AI, and cloud architecture.