Brent Shedd is a serial founder and CEO who has spent two decades at the intersection of technology and the future of work. His experience spans everything from advertising to autonomous vehicles, SAAS productivity tools to frontier robotics in AgTech - always with a focus on using AI to transform legacy industries and practices. As the Founder and CEO of AgRobotics, Brent is focused on using Physical AI to solve some of the most challenging labor problems today.
High-value outdoor labor is running out of hands. Across agriculture, construction, landscaping, and the skilled trades, skyrocketing costs, tightening regulation, and collapsing workforce availability are creating compounding pressure on industries that cannot move indoors and cannot wait. Conventional automation hasn't answered the call. These environments are unstructured, unpredictable, and physically demanding in ways that have stymied robotics for decades. This session introduces a new category of dexterous, learning field robots built specifically for outdoor labor - not adapted from warehouse or lab platforms, but engineered from the ground up for adverse, uncontrolled environments. The $1.8B U.S. strawberry harvest serves as the proving ground: if a robot can handle soft-body, deformable objects with precision across thousands of acres of changing terrain, the underlying architecture transfers across countless outdoor labor uses. Attendees will meet DEX-26, a purpose-built dexterous robot designed to work directly in the furrow - and eventually on the jobsite, in the landscape, and across the trades. The session examines the VLA model architecture making this possible, and the real-world data methods and strategies required to train dexterous manipulation at scale outdoors. Drawing on thousands of hours of prototyping, field testing and business building, this talk delivers a practitioner-level framework: what's working, what's hard, and what a realistic path to commercial deployment actually looks like.
