Back to Event Listing
Thursday, November 5, 2026

The Business of Robotics: How Robotics is Reshaping Work and Industry

Organized by AI in Business Initiative
Time
6:00 PM –
8:00 PM EDT
Add to Calendar
Register
The Business of Robotics: How Robotics is Reshaping Work and Industry image
Description
The Business of Robotics: How Robotics is Reshaping Work and Industry
Thursday, November 5, 2026 | Panel 6:00 – 7:00 PM | Reception 7:00 – 8:00 PM 
Room 1040, Kravis Hall, Columbia Business School

Featuring: 
Daisy Cai '07, General Partner, B Capital
Jeff Cardenas, CEO, Apptronik
You Liang Tan, Co-Founder, Dream Labs

This new series explores the emerging robotics economy and what it means for companies, leaders, and workers. The panel will feature Daisy Cai of B Capital, Jeff Cardenas of Apptronik, and You Liang Tan of Dream Labs. Apptronik develops humanoid robots designed to work alongside people in manufacturing, logistics, and other real-world applications. Dream Labs is a newly launched AI company developing foundation models that enable robots to perform tasks across different machines and environments. The discussion will explore how humanoid robotics is reshaping the future of work, business operations, and human-machine collaboration.

Note: This event is open to Columbia Business School community members and Columbia affiliates.


Admission and Contact: 
You must register to attend this event in person.

Special Notes:
  • This event is open to Columbia Business School community members and Columbia affiliates.
  • This event will not be livestreamed. 
  • Please be advised that this event may be photographed, so your image may appear on our website later. If this is an issue, please let us know.
  • Please bring a government-issued ID or Columbia University ID to access Columbia Business School.
Register
Related Topics
Artificial Intelligence

More Events

Harnessing AI for Innovation and Global Impact: A Conversation with James Manyika

Harnessing AI for Innovation and Global Impact: A Conversation with James ManyikaThursday, November 5, 2026 | 12:45 – 1:45 PMCooperman Commons, Geffen Hall, Columbia Business SchoolFeaturing: James Manyika, President, Research, Labs, Technology & Society, Google & AlphabetModerator: Costis Maglaras, Dean of Columbia Business School, and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business at Columbia UniversityNotes: This in-person-only event will be held at Columbia Business School in Geffen Hall's Cooperman Commons and is limited to Columbia University community members and invited guests. Invitations are non-transferable. Registration links are emailed to school listservs and intended for the recipient only. Please do not share or forward them.Admission will be on a first come first serve basis (in-person only; this event will not be live-streamed). Due to high demand and limited space capacity, an overflow room will be reserved for attendees once the main event space is at capacity. Columbia ID or government-issued ID that matches the name on your registration will be required to check-in to the event.This event will be photographed and video recorded. The content may be used for webcast, telecast, social media, podcast, websites, advertising and other promotional purposes by Columbia Business School and its affiliates and representatives.  Biography:James focuses on advancing Google, Google DeepMind and Alphabet’s most ambitious innovations in AI, computing and science and on their potential for broad beneficial impact on people and society. He also leads Google Research, Google Labs, Learning & Sustainability, and Technology & Society.He was Vice Chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee and Co-Chair of the UN Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body, Vice Chair of the Global Development Council at the White House and member US Secretary of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.He’s a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of Stanford’s AI Institute, and in Ethics in AI at Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, James has DPhil, MSc and MA from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe. View pre-reading materials before the event:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0692zj9jsI&t=5shttps://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/ai-applications-science-people/https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/ai-for-every-language/https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/google-project-suncatcher-facts/https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/ai-science-what-is-the-future-of-discovery

  • View Event Details

Fireside Chat with with Raffaello D’Andrea

Raffaello D'Andrea, professor at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, will discuss his work. His research focuses on embodied intelligence—the intersection of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and the physical world. He is the founder and CEO of Verity, a company that has created a mobile intelligence platform utilizing fleets of fully autonomous drones to eliminate inventory errors, generate actionable operational insights, and close the gap between digital systems and physical operations for global supply chain leaders like IKEA and Maersk. Previously, D'Andrea co-founded Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), where he architected the mobile robots and motion layer for warehouse logistics. The deployment of the system created at Kiva has since grown to over one million autonomous robots globally. He also co-founded the systems engineering program at Cornell University, where he led four RoboCup world championship teams as the program's flagship project, and co-founded ROBO Global, creator of the world's first robotics and AI ETF. This event is part of the BizTech Lecture Series, which explores the intersection of technology and innovation in business. This series features a diverse lineup of industry leaders, executives, and tech pioneers who are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to tackle pressing global business challenges.

  • View Event Details

A Cross-Constituency Workshop on Continual Learning (organized by Hong Namkoong with the AI in Business Initiative)

AI systems today are trained once on a fixed corpus and then frozen, yet the environments where they operate (clinical workflows, marketplaces, robots in homes) keep changing while the system runs, so a model’s knowledge goes stale the moment it ships. Continual learning asks how a system should learn from its own ongoing experience: what to update, what to remember, what to discard, and when accumulated data has become misleading rather than useful. After a decade in which raw scale carried most of the progress, the field is converging on continual learning as the capability that separates a durable, self-improving agent from a brittle snapshot of last year’s data. RL pioneers Richard Sutton & David Silver contend experiential data will ultimately eclipse the scale and quality of human-generated data. Demis Hassabis names continual learning, memory, world models, and reasoning as the targeted algorithmic breakthroughs that come after scaling. CBS is unusually placed to bridge the constituencies now racing into this space, because the school has studied learning in changing environments for more than a decade. Besbes, Gur, and Zeevi formalized continual learning in nonstationary environments in 2015, and that line runs directly into the bandit, reinforcement-learning, and adaptive-experimentation work across the DRO division today. That intellectual connection reaches beyond operations into marketing’s work on personalization, finance and economics’ work on the data economy, and the neuroscience of memory next door at the Zuckerman Institute, giving CBS a genuine claim to convene industry, investors, government, and academia in one room. Positioning. Columbia at the forefront of continual learning across fields, with CBS as the interface between the labs building it, the firms deploying it, the investors funding it, and the agencies that have backed it for a decade.

  • View Event Details

AI in Leadership Luncheon Series: Navigation Risk, Trust, and Innovation with Rumman Chowdhury

The AI in Business Initiative is partnering with the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics to host an Executive Luncheon with Rumman Chowdhury, former U.S. Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence. She will explore the challenges of AI governance, evaluation, and accountability as organizations navigate the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Drawing on her work at the intersection of technology, policy, and society, Chowdhury will examine how organizations can build more responsible and accountable AI systems while addressing the complex risks and challenges emerging alongside rapid technological change.

  • View Event Details