In a podcast published on 2026-11-03, Josh Gruenstein, co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, joins to discuss the state of robotics, manufacturing, and supply chains with the podcast hosts. Tutor Intelligence, based primarily in Boston with about 160 people, trains frontier robot AI models, manufactures robots at scale, and directly deploys them into the largest supply chain businesses across the United States.
Josh started Tutor about five and a half years ago with the core thesis that deploying robots into the physical economy would build the necessary data sets, models, and supply chain. Tutor robots have helped manufacture and ship over a quarter of a billion products to American consumers. Most customers are greenfield buyers who have never purchased a robot before, with 9 out of 10 US factories and warehouses lacking robots.
Josh explains that robotics requires a full-stack platform incorporating model, hardware, software, supply chain, customers, and product, rather than just solving one narrow layer. The company's name stems from connecting human teleoperators (tutors) to robots to embody them with intelligence, creating an internet of robot training data that mirrors how the internet provided data for LLMs. Over time, physical intelligence models, 3D spatial data, and simulation tools help accelerate robot capabilities.
Tutor manufactures its own hardware in Watertown, Massachusetts, to co-design robots with frontier models. They produce two main robot types:
1. **Cassie**: A brute force, single-arm robot powered by foundation models (200 to 400 million parameter range) using suction cups to handle heavy-duty tasks like transporting pallets and cardboard boxes, addressing backbreaking physical work.
2. **Sunny**: An industrial semi-humanoid with wheels, a higher payload capacity, faster speed, and industrial collaborative safety standards, operating in Boston data factories and real-world sites for dexterous bimanual manipulation. A hundred Sunny robots operate in Boston, and a growing fleet is deployed in the real world.
Customer adoption is driven by offering robots for 16 bucks an hour with zero economic risk on the customer. The average time from the first call to a signed contract is 40 to 60 days, and from signed contract to deployment is about 40 days, with production standup often within hours. Small and mid-market businesses as well as Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 companies utilize them. Operations teams view the robots as reliable equipment once operational, and human-robot interaction (HRI) techniques—such as naming robots after customer children, football players, and pop stars upon repeat orders—cultivate strong relationships with workers.
Looking forward, Josh discusses the evolution of the global supply chain, noting that in 2026, the global supply chain remains interconnected and interdependent. While China invested heavily in the previous regime of industrial automation, U.S. companies are building greenfield capacity using generally capable robots without needing to tear down existing infrastructure. Tutor continues to verticalize, bringing more manufacturing and componentry in-house to Watertown, Massachusetts, and investing heavily to build a mature domestic robotic supply chain.
Tutor's research program leverages a 100-robot fleet called Data Factory One in Boston to perform real-world reinforcement learning at scale. The company is actively hiring researchers, engineers across every layer of the stack, and technicians to build robots. Ultimately, Tutor aims to provide a general-purpose labor substrate that transforms the physical economy, makes goods cheaper, and helps businesses scale physical operations.