WORKR to show $25/hr robotic worker in action at NVIDIA GTC 2026 booth

March 9 2026, Palo Alto - Robotic workforce company WORKR will showcase its $25/hr robot in a live demo at the NVIDIA Booth during GTC 2026. 

WORKR will give an interactive live-demo of one of its commercial deployments with Fireclay Tile, where it has automated strenuous, repetitive saw work at the California-based ceramics manufacturer.

WORKR  provides a plug-and-produce workforce, making robotics accessible to the 90% of U.S. manufacturing currently unautomated due to the prohibitive cost and complexity of traditional robotics.

Since its deployment at Fireclay Tile, WORKR has significantly increased throughput by automating complex, high-mix production tasks, like tile picking and wet-saw loading. These tasks require both precision and adaptability, but the high level of monotony makes them difficult for human operators to perform consistently at scale. 

The implementation supports Fireclay's 300-person team to increase output while focusing their time on the handmade craftsmanship the company has built its reputation around.

Often reliant on highly sensitive, expensive sensors and laborious coding, the industry standard for programming a new robot task ranges from hours to weeks. 

WORKR's proprietary physical-AI system, WorkrCore, cuts that time to under three minutes using an intuitive interface, and thrives in the messy, high-variability environments of real-world factories. 

The deployment model has generated strong commercial interest from major U.S. manufacturers, including active evaluations across cabinetry and timber manufacturing.

“WORKR's $25 per hour model removes the CapEx barrier that stopped us before, and the way their team works to understand your problem rather than push a solution sealed it for me." said Nirmal Kumar Ravichandran. Director of Manufacturing at Fireclay Tile. 

By offering its assisting manufacturing labor via a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, Workr enables mid and small size manufacturers to scale without massive capital expenditure.

WORKR have a single fixed cost regardless of contract length or complexity.

After a one-time deployment fee covering physical delivery and installation of the hardware, a $25/hour covers the operational cost of a WORKR deployment, with manufacturers paying only for productive hours. 

"We aren't just a robotics company, we are a workforce solution for the 400,000+ vacant manufacturing roles in the U.S." said WORKR CEO and co-founder Ken Macken.

"Traditional automation doesn’t work for manufacturers who deal with high-mix production because it takes months to program a single new part. We are taking the complexity and cost out of the process and replacing it with a model that matches the reality of the American shop floor."

“A manufacturer running one WORKR system on a single 8-hour shift pays $200 for that shift. A standard production week costs $1,000. At that run rate, the deployment fee is recovered in roughly three to four weeks of operation,” explains Macken. 

An NVIDIA inception member, WORKR is enabling technical breakthrough lies in its deep integration with NVIDIA Isaac Sim open simulation framework and NVIDIA Omniverse.

The system uses both models to create a digital twin of each robot’s work station, generating physically accurate synthetic data to fine-tune models on-site. 

This allows WORKR robots to learn a new part from a single image - no expensive CAD files or time consuming coding required - while maintaining the strict tolerances demanded by industrial production.

By running its entire AI training and inference pipeline on multiple NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q GPUs onboard each robot, WORKR eliminates cloud latency and data privacy concerns. 

“Our goal is to make a robot as simple to deploy as a printer or a dishwasher,” said WORKR's Ken Macken.

“The technology is sophisticated, but the user experience is intentionally simple. This is how we fill the jobs that people no longer want to do, allowing them to move into higher-value roles.”

While WorkrCore is hardware-agnostic and can work with any robot, the GTC exhibit will demonstrate the system running on ABB robotics hardware, providing an enterprise-grade proof point that this technology is ready for global scale. 

WORKR is currently raising its next round to meet the demand of its growing customer waitlist. 

"For decades, advanced robotics was a luxury only the largest corporations could afford," Macken concludes. "WORKR changes that math. By turning a million-dollar technical hurdle into a utility, we are ensuring every manufacturer can thrive in the next industrial revolution.”

– ENDS –

Media contact

Michelle Dickinson

Michelle@workr.com

About WORKR WORKR is a robotic workforce company making physical AI accessible to manufacturers of all sizes. By running the entire AI training and inference pipeline on GPUs at the edge, WORKR’s systems learn tasks in minutes and require zero programming knowledge from customers.