3 days ago
Beyond agentic AI: Autonomous factories, exoskeletons, and AI as a physical stack
Shanker Trivedi, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Business, NVIDIA Pradeep Gupta, Vice President, Generative AI & Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA Susan Marshall, Senior Director, Developer Relations, NVIDIA Prerna Dogra, Director, Product Management & Developer Ecosystems, Healthcare AI, NVIDIA Rajani Parameshwar, Senior Director, Corporate Development, NVIDIA
Live Events
Next generation warehouses and factories that autonomously produce cars. Wearable exoskeletons that respond to a person's movements in real time and enhance ergonomic support, mobility, and rehabilitation. 'Embodied' hospitals that have AI integrated in physical agents such as robots to support operational and medical tasks. The everyman — whether a biologist, librarian, musician, and so on — as a developer in a specific of this may sound like science fiction, but it is science fact that will inevitably come to be in the near future. That was the broad takeaway of the grand panel, 'The Future of AI – Platforms, Innovation, & Investments' on day three of TiEcon 2025, the world's largest tech conference, and the biggest in its 32-year history, took place this May in the heart of Silicon Valley. The conference brought together 3,000-plus entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders from around the globe. With over 180 speakers and this year's theme, 'AiVerse', the conference showcased the transformative power of innovation. Under the leadership of TiE Silicon Valley President Anita Manwani, TiEcon continues to drive a culture of transformational change, fostering new ideas, connections, and opportunities for the next wave of global panelists for 'The Future of AI – Platforms, Innovation, & Investments' were:Some highlights from the discussion:Apart from exoskeletons that can detect intent and locomotion and support wearers without manual input, AI use cases in healthcare extend to brain-computer interfaces, especially for conditions like Alzheimer's disease. In hospitals, embodied AI can function autonomously through a combination of sensors, robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. And in the realm of biotechnology, initiatives such as AlphaFold are predicting protein structures with atomic-level precision, revolutionising medical and biological research.'Our journey started about 15 years ago with sensor processing. Building on that stack, we now have a world-class, medical-grade, real-time sensor processing platform called HoloScan. It's the first of its kind: the foundation of what we're seeing in intuitive, robotics-assisted surgery,' Prerna Dogra said. 'We also founded an open-source project called MONAI or the Medical Open Network for AI. It's crossed five million downloads and is a benchmark in medical R&D. There's an explosion of startups and AI agents shaping how care is delivered. In Silicon Valley alone, you have 17, 18, 19 such verticals.'NVIDIA's Developer Relations division is bridging the gap between developers and cutting-edge tech by giving stakeholders — including startup founders — the partnership and support required to build applications accelerated by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Its Senior Director Susan Marshall, a former founder herself, now works with startups across financial services, robotics, and healthcare for their full AI stacks. Through prepackaged 'containers' called NVIDIA Inference Microservices or NIMS, the company offers workstations, data centres, and neo-clouds that effectively streamline the running of AI models.'We now have 22,000 startups in our programme, and it's growing. It could even be two guys in a garage that have a great idea, and we'll go out and help,' Marshall said. 'NVIDIA is a very founder-friendly company. We are check size-agnostic and stage agnostic. Between the two investing arms of NVIDIA, CorpDev and Nventures, we pretty much cover a wide gamut of startups.'NVIDIA is currently helping solve domain-specific problems in 20-plus industries, ranging from drug discovery and retail checkouts to algorithmic trading and digital twins in is a major investor in 'neo-clouds' or AI-focussed cloud providers. And because GPUs are energy-intensive, the company has taken a proactive approach to partnering with startups that work to reduce energy bottlenecks via sustainable energy solutions such as wind, solar, geothermal, and carbon company's Jetson edge AI platform is also being deployed in smart meters in the US. Capabilities include processing troves of local energy data, predicting grid conditions, helping utility providers optimise load management, and helping consumers reduce their bills through real-time energy management.
