Rivian intends to hand as much as 80% of the work on its factory floors to AI-enabled robots, beginning with about 20% of plant tasks, according to CEO RJ Scaringe. The effort runs through Mind Robotics, the startup Rivian spun off last year to develop autonomous driving and what Scaringe calls physical AI.
Scaringe gave the figures in an interview with Kleiner Perkins, and no date has been announced for when the robots will reach Rivian's production lines. The company builds the R1S, R1T and R2 electric vehicles.
What the first robots would actually do
The initial targets are not the big fixed arms already common in car plants worldwide, including Rivian's. Those machines are manually programmed to repeat one task and only work when a part arrives in exactly the same position every time.
Rivian's robots are aimed at the human jobs that involve some variability: picking a part out of a bin and placing it on a fixture. Scaringe says AI-enabled robots can detect small differences in where parts sit inside a bin and adapt.
"These are the immediate opportunities we see," he said. "And these tend to be the ones that often are the least interesting jobs." He added that depending on the section of the plant, up to 50% of the labour is in pick-and-place posts.
That framing matters for anyone weighing a Rivian purchase or watching the company's costs: the plan attacks the most repetitive, least skilled work first, which is where automation is easiest to justify and hardest to argue against.
Filming workers to train the software
Engineers recorded how a wide range of factory tasks are carried out, then fed the footage into software that decodes what happens in each frame and issues commands to the robot. Scaringe said thousands of tasks were filmed and characterised by difficulty, both in terms of dexterity and reasoning.
"The model gets smarter over time," he said.
Rivian and Mind Robotics have also recruited staff from the consumer electronics industry. Scaringe drew a direct line between the two fields: someone who worked on a tactile-sensing phone has skills a robot needs, because a robot needs tactile sensing too.
Which models are affected
The robots are a manufacturing change rather than a product one, and the sources do not tie the plan to specific vehicles. Rivian's current line-up is the R1S SUV, R1T pickup and R2, and the automation effort is described at the level of plant tasks rather than individual models.
The same hardware-first, software-later approach shows up in Rivian's Gen2 R1S and R1T. Those vehicles carry the hardware for point-to-point hands-free driving, with the software due to arrive on a small scale through an over-the-air update in late 2026 and a wider rollout in 2027.
Rivian has not said which plants will get the robots first, how many units it will deploy, or what the programme will cost.
Why a carmaker is building robots
Rivian is not alone in pushing automation further, but the 80% figure is a statement of ambition rather than a schedule. The company has not said when that level will be reached, only that it starts at roughly 20%.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Pick-and-place work is a large share of labour in some plant sections, and it is the kind of job that is hardest to fill and easiest to standardise once the robot can cope with variation.
For buyers, the near-term effect is indirect: cheaper, more consistent assembly is the goal, not a new model or a new feature. The more immediate product news remains the hands-free driving software coming to Gen2 R1S and R1T from late 2026.
