The artificial intelligence innovation chief at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest hyperscaler, or operator of large-scale computing infrastructure, said the era of physical AI has arrived and stressed that AI can solve labor shortage problems.
"Physical AI is the next frontier of AI," Sri Elaprolu, director of the AWS Innovation Center, said in an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily at the AWS Summit 2026 held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. AWS is a subsidiary of retail giant Amazon that builds data centers and operates cloud services, or large-scale virtual storage spaces connected via the internet.
Physical AI is a field that combines the physical world with AI, with self-driving cars and humanoids as representative industries. "AI has been in the digital world, and we have used AI models for training and inference," Elaprolu said. "If this capability can automate things and grant more autonomy to activities happening in the physical world, the value we can create becomes even greater."
Physical AI has become a reality to the extent that Amazon has already deployed robots to its facilities in large numbers. "Physical AI is already one of the things Amazon is doing," Elaprolu said. "With more than a million robots operating in our warehouses, robotics is playing a fairly large role." He added, "As the world's largest robot operator, Amazon has a solid foundation in this field. Going forward, AI will be used not only in the digital world but also in the implementation of robots and humanoids."
Elaprolu visited Korea last month and personally examined robot hand technology with RealWorld's engineering team. RealWorld is a startup that developed a robotics foundation model (RFM) mounted on dexterity robots. He said RealWorld is collaborating with Lotte Hotel, indicating that physical AI has already entered its preparation stage.
"RealWorld trained its robots using AWS infrastructure and models and is deploying them in actual field settings," Elaprolu said. "Various attempts are being made in Korea, Japan and elsewhere." He stressed, "There are growing concerns about a shortage of workers to perform tasks in the field. To solve this, robots will play an important role."
