Walk through enough tech conferences and you’ll start noticing a pattern. A few years ago, every major booth wanted to show off an electric vehicle. This year, according to Guident Chairman and CEO Harald Braun, the cars had largely disappeared.
“They were only robots everywhere,” Braun told Refresh Miami from the company’s office inside the Boca Raton Innovation Campus.
For Braun, that shift is confirmation that the industry is beginning to catch up with a vision Guident has been pursuing for years: a future where autonomous vehicles and robots don’t operate alone, but are continuously monitored, assisted, and, when needed, controlled by humans.
The company has spent the past year turning that idea into commercial deployments. One of its most visible projects is now running daily at Mizner Park, where an autonomous shuttle [pictured above] transports passengers through mixed traffic during peak afternoon and evening hours.
“We have a good ridership model there,” Braun said. “The city is very happy.”
The Boca deployment follows an earlier project in West Palm Beach and reflects Guident’s broader push to move autonomous transportation beyond pilot programs and into everyday use.
That same philosophy extends to the company’s software platform. Guident recently expanded its technology into four modules covering monitoring, assistance, control, and analytics, allowing customers to license individual components instead of the entire platform. Braun said one customer purchased only the analytics module, underscoring growing demand for specialized tools.
The company is also seeing momentum with WatchBot, an autonomous robot that patrols facilities, checking doors, lights, screens, and other infrastructure while feeding data back into Guident’s software platform.
“We have sold it five times,” Braun said, including deployments with customers in Europe, Mexico, and the United States.
Those wins reinforce Braun’s belief that robotics is entering an inflection point. While artificial intelligence has dominated headlines, he believes robotics is beginning to follow the same trajectory.
“What was ten years ago the drones, today is robotics,” he said.
Rather than viewing AI and robotics as separate trends, Braun sees them becoming increasingly intertwined. Guident is building agentic AI into its platform so software can analyze situations, recommend actions, and support remote operators without removing humans from the process.
If an autonomous vehicle encounters an obstacle, for example, AI can recommend the safest response before a human operator approves the action.
“The human is always in the loop,” Braun said.
The industry appears to be moving in the same direction. Braun pointed to this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where robots dominated exhibition halls and agentic AI became a central theme.
“There was one booth,” he recalled. “They didn’t even have a person there. It was all robots and a screen.”
Guident now employs roughly 20 people plus contractors and continues preparing for a future Nasdaq listing while expanding its commercial footprint. The company also recently hosted its fifth autonomous vehicle conference in Boca Raton, bringing together industry leaders, regulators, and transportation officials to discuss how autonomous technology can move from pilots to large-scale deployment.
For Braun, that future no longer feels far away. The robots are already working. The software is already making recommendations. The next chapter is making sure humans and machines learn to work together.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
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