Industrial Next: Building an AI Autopilot for Factories with Lukas Pankau

In this episode, host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Lukas Pankau, co-founder and CEO of Industrial Next, an award winner from the NEAS Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards competition. 

Lukas shares how his and co-founder Alan’s experience at Tesla during the Model 3 ramp inspired them to bring modern autonomy and intelligence into factories, where industrial robots are typically pre-programmed and lack contextual understanding. He explains Industrial Next’s vision of an “AI autopilot for a factory,” including the need for deeper robot control than many manufacturers currently expose, the importance of integrating with legacy factory systems, and cases where the company provides hardware alongside optimized software. 

Lukas also describes how improved line visibility and data can transform productivity, supply-chain responsiveness, and even enable more localized, modular manufacturing—reducing waste from scrapped production lines and supporting reshoring for cost and national security reasons. He closes with near-term goals of running a fully designed production line with their equipment, ongoing hiring needs across AI and engineering roles, and his success metric: being able to buy electronics built locally at a lower price than today.

More about Lukas:

Lukas Pankau is the Co-Founder and CEO (sometimes referred to as co-CEO or CTO in various sources) of Industrial Next (also styled as IndustrialNext or industrialnext.ai), a startup focused on autonomous manufacturing, robotics, and AI-driven production systems, particularly for industries like electric vehicles (EV) and general manufacturing.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaspankau/

Company Website: https://industrialnext.ai/

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