Dive Brief: - As manufacturers look to adopt and deploy robotics, many are moving faster than their operating models can support, according to a survey commissioned by Intel of 800 business and IT leaders, robotics specialists and government and healthcare officials around the world. - The research found a “stark disconnect” in that seven in 10 senior manufacturing leaders expect their organization to have a fleet of robots in the next five years, but roughly four in 10 have a formal strategy to manage a mixed workforce of humans and robots. - Unclear ownership of a robotics strategy across the organization could be a contributing factor to the 26% preparedness gap in manufacturing. The study, conducted by Man Bites Dog and Coleman Parkes Research, also identified gaps related to workforce skills, safety, form factor and scaling of robotics. Dive Insight: For decades, the role of robots was relatively simple. They were fixed machines with fixed tasks and fixed environments. But as technologies have evolved, powered by advancements in artificial intelligence, edge computing and real-time software, the industry is entering a “new phase of intelligent robots that can sense, reason and act,” John Healy, Intel’s vice president and general manager of industrial and robotics, said in the report. “This move from repetition to interaction is changing the role of robotics entirely,” he said. “It also exposes an uncomfortable truth: most organizations are unprepared.” Across industries, companies are moving beyond experimentation and beginning to embed robotics into their daily operations. However, Healy pointed out that many are building on antiquated foundations from a pre-autonomy era, including systems that weren’t designed to adapt and teams that were never trained to manage machines that learn. “Robots need to be able to perform under pressure, and this takes more than a breakthrough in AI,” he