Sauvage: 99% robot dexterity yields 36.6% workflow success

Sauvage's argument builds from a compounding-probability example rather than a product announcement, extending his firm's long-standing thesis as a robotics investor. As founder and president of TDK Ventures, the corporate venture arm of TDK Corp., he says its investments in Agility, ANYbotics, and Starship have changed the questions he asks, moving the focus away from which robot looks most human.

He points to three portfolio companies as evidence for purpose-built reliability: Agility's Digit, ANYbotics' four-legged inspection robots, and Starship's small, wheeled delivery robots. The specific figures he cites — more than 33,000 inspections across 450 inspection points for ANYbotics, and more than 10 million autonomous deliveries for Starship — illustrate that different physical forms can each fit a distinct job. The proposed shift in measurement is toward what percentage of complete workflows finish without human assistance, and how quickly a robot can recover when something goes wrong.