When I left Amazon, one of the things I missed most wasn't the resources or the scale. It was the conversations. The ones that happened in the hallways after a big review, or over dinner with someone like Jeff Wilke or Dave Clark, where you could go deep on a real operational problem with someone who had actually lived it. No slides. Just two operators comparing notes on what actually works and what it takes to move robots from a demo to a production deployment, and why that gap is so brutally hard to close.

At Cobot, I've been fortunate to keep having them. With operators running some of the most complex logistics and healthcare automation systems in the world. With investors like Alfred Lin at Sequoia who are placing enormous bets on the future of Physical AI. With engineers solving robotics problems that didn't exist five years ago. And what keeps hitting me is how much signal is in these conversations and how little of it makes it out into the world.

There's plenty of AI content out there. Almost all of it is about software. And most of it is hype.

What I don't see enough of is operators. People who have deployed automation at scale and understand why the gap between a great demo and a real robot deployment is so hard to close. People who can tell you what happens when you put an autonomous mobile robot in a hospital and it meets a hallway full of IV poles, visitors, and a code blue. That perspective is rare and it's incredibly valuable.

So we created Deployed.

What Is Deployed?

Deployed is a weekly podcast where I sit down with the leaders who are building, deploying, and investing in Physical AI and robotics. No demo reels. No hype cycles. Just deep conversations with people who have shipped real automation — in warehouses, hospitals, manufacturing floors, and beyond.

Most robotics demos never ship. Deployed is about the ones that do.

Episode 1: Jeff Wilke on Scaling Amazon, Choosing Your Bottleneck, and Rebuilding American Manufacturing

Our first guest is Jeff Wilke — former CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer business and one of the most accomplished operational leaders of the last 25 years.

Jeff and I worked together for over a decade at Amazon. He's the person who transformed Amazon's operations from packing books on the floor to the most sophisticated warehouse automation and logistics machine on the planet. When I walked into his office and said I wanted to run robotics coming from a background in distributed systems and software architecture, not operations. He saw something I wasn't sure was there. He bet on me. That bet changed my career.

In this episode, Jeff tells the story of arriving at Amazon in 1999 with a manufacturing playbook he'd built over six years in the chemical and metals industries and watching those principles scale from a billion dollars to a trillion dollars flowing through the network. He shares the real backstory of how Amazon's drone delivery program started, which is not the story most people assume. He talks about the meeting where his team projected Amazon would reach a million employees, when they had 200,000, and how the entire room refused to believe it.

That projection changed Amazon's automation and robotics strategy. It's one reason Amazon built its own air fleet, vertically integrated into transportation, and accelerated robot deployment across the fulfillment network.

And he drops a framework that I still think about constantly:

"You have an operating plan when you choose the bottleneck. If the bottleneck reveals itself to you, you don't have an operating plan, you have a reaction plan. Those two things are pretty different."

If you run any kind of operation, whether it’s logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, that one idea is worth the listen.

Since leaving Amazon, Jeff co-founded Re:Build Manufacturing to bring industrial manufacturing back to the US. It's an ambitious, long-horizon play that I deeply respect. And he's still one of the sharpest operational thinkers I know.

What's Next for Deployed

This is the first of many. Season 1 features:

• Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital — the investment thesis behind Physical AI and why the physical world is hostile to humans
• Bilal Zuberi, Lux Capital — deep-tech investing and the next generation of robotics startups
• Ross Fubini — enterprise AI and robot deployment at scale
• More guests to be announced

Every conversation is grounded in the same thing: what's working, what's hard, and what's next for Physical AI, robotics, and real-world automation.

Listen and Subscribe

I've spent my career building — platforms at Amazon, the robotics organization, and now Collaborative Robotics. Deployed is a different kind of building. But the intent is the same. Bring together the best people, have honest conversations, and make each other sharper.

New episodes drop every two weeks. Subscribe wherever you listen:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Amazon Music
• RSS

Let's get to work.

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*Deployed is hosted by Brad Porter, founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), former VP of Amazon Robotics, and former CTO of Scale AI. The podcast features conversations with leaders in Physical AI, robotics, warehouse automation, autonomous mobile robots, healthcare automation, and manufacturing about what it takes to move from demo to production deployment. New episodes weekly.*