For decades, automation was predictable. Robots repeated programmed movements behind safety fences while humans handled everything requiring judgement, dexterity and adaptability.

That boundary is disappearing.

A new generation of AI-powered machines can see their surroundings, interpret unfamiliar objects, learn new tasks and operate in environments built for people.

Michelle Dickinson has worked inside this transition, and continues to advise on it today. Drawing on her experience building and deploying robotics and physical AI into real workplaces, she takes audiences beyond the headlines and inside what is actually happening as artificial intelligence moves from the screen into the physical world.

But this isn’t a keynote about robots.

It’s about us.

If machines can increasingly perform both cognitive and physical tasks, where does human value move next? What happens to careers, organisations and society when experience can be encoded into machines? And how should leaders prepare their people for a world in which the division of labour between humans and technology is being rewritten?