The Blue Ocean Nobody Sees
Janusz Nowakowski · March 2026 · Biel/Bienne, Switzerland · Switzerland Innovation Park
If AI is eating software engineering, where do the builders go?
Last week at the International Humanoid Forum in Biel, I stopped watching the stage and started talking to the people behind the robots.
Pascal, a PhD researcher at ZHAW, teaches robots to imagine consequences. "You hold a cup of water and open your hand. You already know it will fall. Robots don't."
His approach: break tasks into atomic operations. Grasp. Walk. Place. His spin-off Binaric AI already sterilizes hospital instruments with real clients.
Arijana went to China last year. Saw what was coming. Came back and started RoboSwiss. They don't sell robots. They rent them. "People are not used to robots yet. So we rent, we train, we support." Their cleaning robot runs in restaurants in Romandie, real revenue. A construction robot paints 200 m² in under an hour.
Gabriel co-founded Aurelium. Mission: humanoids in hospitals. Robots carry food from kitchen to ward. But from ward to bedside, people in corridors, someone in shock, that is unsolved.
Three stories, three stages
A company making money. A spin-off bridging research and industry. A pre-seed team with a vision.
The Swiss Robotics Association counted 250 open positions at their job fair.
The red ocean and the blue
Now here is what I keep thinking about.
In software, AI writes code faster every month. Supply grows, demand compresses. Red ocean. Sharks everywhere.
In physical AI, a robot still cannot trace the edge of a table with its fingertip. Cannot pick tangled springs from a bin without dropping half. Cannot adjust its grip when an object turns out softer than expected.
These are not hypothetical problems. I watched engineers in Biel work on exactly this.
The empty room
And almost nobody outside that room knows about it. I did not see a single student on the exhibition floor. The most exciting engineering problems in Switzerland are happening thirty minutes from Bern, and the next generation is not there.
If you are an engineer, a manufacturer, a student wondering where the future is, look at Swiss Innovation Park. The physical world is wide open. The builders are hiring. The problems they solve will not be automated by a chatbot.
This is the blue ocean. Almost nobody is swimming in it yet.
Physical AI needs infrastructure decisions too.
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