From Lab to Deployment: Moonlake, Agility Robotics & PrismaX on Getting Robots into the Real World

Demo is not deployment. At RoboCon Physical AI Salon during SF Tech Week by a16z, Sharon Lee (Moonlake), Vivek G. Ramaswamy (Agility Robotics), and Bayley Wang (PrismaX) dig into what it actually takes to get robots out of the lab and into real work: where simulation helps and where it stops, why the best model is the one that fits on your robot, and what "good" means to the customers deploying them. Panelists Sharon Lee, Cofounder, Moonlake Vivek G. Ramaswamy, Senior Product Manager, AI & Models, Agility Robotics Bayley Wang, Cofounder & CEO, PrismaX (moderator) Chapters 00:00 Welcome and introductions 02:46 The deployment challenge: demo is not deployment 04:45 How simulation de-risks deployment 07:14 Can sim help close the RL gap? 08:32 Running foundation models on real robot hardware 10:18 Small models, digital twins and digital cousins 12:55 Customer data, IP, and the warehouse floor 13:51 What makes a good robotics simulator 16:03 The hardest physics to simulate 18:04 Simulation for regression testing 18:19 What "good" means to customers 20:59 Is 96% good enough? 22:50 Building outside your core competence 26:30 Hot takes: classical robotics, end-to-end, and LLMs as policies 30:11 Audience Q&A 32:26 Cloud vs. edge inference for robotics 43:17 Closing: closed-loop learning as the moat RoboCon Physical AI Salon was co-hosted by PrismaX and Moonlake on October 9, 2026, during SF Tech Week by a16z. About PrismaX PrismaX is a robotics-native service layer setting standards for how robots, data, and human work are deployed to advance intelligence for physical AI systems. Website: https://www.prismax.ai X: https://x.com/PrismaXai LinkedIn:   / prismaxai   About Moonlake Moonlake builds world models and simulation for robot deployment. Website: https://moonlakeai.com X: https://x.com/moonlake LinkedIn:   / moonlake-ai   #PhysicalAI #Robotics #RoboCon