AI robots are coming, and they will be made in Asia

The region's tech companies are uniquely positioned to take the technology far beyond chatbots.

- Catherine Thorbecke

Over the past year, I've noticed an overwhelming theme emerge when Asian tech leaders look at what comes next for artificial intelligence. There has been a marked desire to move beyond chatbots and software, and into the physical realm.

We'll start to see much more AI-enabled hardware and robotics - and it will be coming from Asia.

The experience I've had tuning in to many executive chats and tech conferences could best be summed by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang's proclamation in Taipei in June. "The next wave of AI is physical AI," he said. "The era of robotics has arrived."

Historically, a lot of coverage of robot-human interactions in Asia have been filled with futuristic techno-orientalist tropes that often fail to reflect the reality. But there are factors that make the region uniquely primed to propel this next leap forward in integrating AI into the physical world. While the US is the leader in AI advances - and the software and internet revolution emanated from Silicon Valley - Asian tech giants have traditionally been very good at the hardware side of things.