Humanoid robots are moving beyond flashy demos and into some of the hardest environments on Earth: shipyards, energy sites, manufacturing floors, construction projects, and other industrial settings where skilled labor is scarce and the work is often dangerous, physically demanding, and difficult to automate.
Greg sits down with Jide Akinyode, co-founder and COO of Persona AI, to unpack what it really takes to build humanoids for heavy industry. Jide traces his path from NASA Johnson Space Center, where he started at 19 and spent a decade working on advanced dexterity, robotic astronauts, humanoids, and mobile manipulators, to Nauticus Robotics, where he helped bring robotic manipulation into harsh subsea environments.
Now at Persona AI, Jide is focused on building industrial humanoids that can do real work in places where traditional automation struggles. The conversation explores why shipbuilding is such a compelling first market, why the humanoid form factor matters in cluttered human-built environments, and what robotics companies often underestimate about deployment, maintenance, workflow integration, and customer adoption.
Highlights:
- Jide’s path from NASA Johnson Space Center to Nauticus Robotics, and how building robots for space and subsea environments shaped his view of commercial robotics.
- What changed in 2024 that shifted him from humanoid skeptic to founder, including stronger component supply chains, better simulation tools, reinforcement learning, behavior mimicry, and embodied AI.
- Why Persona AI is starting with heavy industries like shipbuilding, energy, construction, and manufacturing rather than homes, offices, or retail environments.
- The labor gap in skilled trades, including welders, grinders, painters, and fabricators, and why Persona sees humanoids as an alternative labor solution for industrial operators.
- Why humanoids do not need to look human, but do need the mobility, dexterity, and flexibility to work in spaces designed around human bodies and hands.
- What shipyards reveal about automation: tight spaces, massive structures, fragmented workflows, and the surprising reality that welders may spend only a small portion of their day actually welding.
- The challenge of moving from impressive demos to industrial deployments, including transparency with customers, realistic POCs, expectation management, and proving reliability over time.
- How Persona evaluates first deployments by looking at robot density, task value, customer readiness, cost of the current workflow, and the likelihood of real adoption.
- Why the challenge is not just hardware or autonomy, but the entire stack: mechanical design, embedded systems, controls, perception, autonomy, fleet management, manufacturing, operations, and customer workflow integration.
- What a successful early deployment could look like, from rugged robots surviving shipyard environments to reliably laying down welds in small and medium block assembly.
- The breadth of talent required to build humanoids, from actuation, structures, mechanisms, embedded software, controls, manipulation, locomotion, perception, autonomy, data collection, ML, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations.
- Why ML, autonomy, manipulation, and grasping talent are especially hard to find in today’s robotics market.
- How Jide thinks about culture, communication, and company building as COO, including why his “product” is now the team, the operating system, and the way Persona scales.
- The future Jide wants to see: humans moved away from dangerous physical work and upskilled into robot operators, fleet managers, and technical supervisors.
- Jide’s advice for anyone building robotics that changes the physical world: talk to customers, listen deeply, strip away assumptions, and get ready for hard work.
For anyone building robots, hiring robotics teams, or trying to understand where humanoids will actually create economic value, this conversation offers a grounded look at the long road from demo videos to real industrial deployment.
Learn more about Persona AI:
Connect with Jide Akinyode on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jideakinyode/
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/
