Introducing Launchpad Build AI’s World of Tomorrow Summit
Last month, Launchpad Build AI hosted an exclusive summit in Edinburgh, Scotland, to discuss the future of AI and robotics. We were privileged to have the event covered in a series of articles by leading publication, Newsweek. In this post, the first of four, we look back at the event and showcase some of the insights it revealed.
AI has spent the last few years proving what it can do with words, images and code. The next test is harder: can it hold up on a factory floor, where mistakes aren’t just embarrassing – they’re expensive, physical and sometimes dangerous?
That question sat at the heart of World of Tomorrow, the gathering Launchpad Build AI hosted in Edinburgh last month. As Newsweek’s Megan Carnegie put it in the first of her articles about the event, “the bigger story is where AI is heading next: into robotics, advanced manufacturing and the physical systems that make, move, and assemble things in the real world.”
Newsweek framed the stakes plainly: “A chatbot can make things up; a robot arm cannot.”
That distinction – between software failure and physical failure – is exactly why we felt this conversation needed a room of its own, and why we chose to hold it away from the usual tech-conference circuit.
The guest list reflected the scope of the challenge. The roughly 50-person gathering brought together chip, compute and simulation companies including Nvidia, TSMC and Nebius; industrial, defense and technology leaders from organizations like Lockheed Martin UK, BAE Systems Air, Leonardo, Ericsson Ventures and Booz Allen Hamilton; investors and advisers from J.P. Morgan, Lavrock Ventures, Squadra Ventures, Bain and Orrick; and figures from the Scottish government and its economic-development bodies.
The pressure behind the moment is real. Newsweek noted that, in the US, “the workforce still has 1.7 million fewer people than it did in February 2020…even as manufacturers continue to report hiring strain.” And in the UK, “British firms are expected to invest roughly $650 billion in [reindustrialization] by 2028, while supply chains remain fragile and vulnerable to shocks.”
Our own CEO, Jon Quick, summed up the disconnect this creates: “We all want reindustrialization, But the crossover in conversation around AI and manufacturing is hard to decipher—there’s no pragmatic middle ground of where to go and what to do.”
That’s the gap World of Tomorrow was built to close: not another showcase of what models can say, but a working session on what it will take to get AI safely and usefully onto the factory floor.
Over the following days, leaders from industry, government, defense and investment sat down in Edinburgh to find a way to do just that.
You can read all the articles in the Newsweek series about Launchpad Build AI’s Summit here:
https://www.newsweek.com/world-of-tomorrow-ai-factory-floor-12106904
https://www.newsweek.com/world-of-tomorrow-scotland-ai-robotics-12116700
https://www.newsweek.com/ai-race-models-manufacturing-world-of-tomorrow-12122020
https://www.newsweek.com/ai-industrial-power-struggles-world-of-tomorrow-12146543
