NEURA Robotics founder and CEO David Reger sits down with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, for the first episode of the NEURA Executive Talk, a conversation about where intelligence is really heading and why two very different companies are building toward the same future.
They get into distributed intelligence, on-edge AI, the coming machine economy, and Europe’s role in shaping the next era of technology, along with one question worth sitting with: if everything you run sits on someone else’s technology, are you really free?
The NEURA Executive Talk brings together the people shaping what com...
Questions asked in this interview
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0:54What is the purpose of this collaboration or partnership?
Yeah. I mean, I love small cities. You know, eventually we could have some good amount of robots roaming the streets here as well. I think Europe should be at the forefront of this stuff and if you don't always want the United States or China to be leading the technology advancements, there is a company like yours here that is competing at the highest levels and it would be sad to lose that opportunity.
I'm very lucky. It's a very comfortable place and very quiet and nice. First of all, thank you for your precious time you're spending with me. And at the same time, I would love to talk a little bit about the things we are planning together or where we think together what can be the benefit for the world while us collaborating. What is it about? What is the purpose of this collaboration or partnership? Let's scratch the surface of what you're building, what we are building, and what we can do together. That's the idea today.
AI needs to be part of everything. And so any AI needs to be granular. AI needs to be truly embedded in every single system. Any light bulb, any shoe, any glass should technically have an AI. A light bulb could have an AI that understands the perfect amount of energy to consume at any moment based on the surroundings and what is happening in the room. A shoe could also be event-based or maybe in the moment where it really needs to be lighted up. So you can create everything with intelligence in this world. If we build around that, it means AI needs to be local. AI being local is very important for an intelligent car. An intelligent car should decide when to brake immediately after looking at a local model, understanding what is going on around and take an immediate decision. It cannot wait for latency or a connection that might or might not be there. Also, you have a smart fridge that needs to order stuff for you that you are missing, or elderly care robot that needs to take actions immediately to save the life of patients. It is clear that the future requires local on-device AI. Building and developing AI that is local to the user's devices is also fundamental for people who today have a hard time accessing big cloud models. On one side, with Tether we want to solve the issue of financial inclusion. I think there is an even bigger issue: intelligence inclusion. So we want to solve that for all the population living in emerging markets and developing countries. Looking much further into the future, how AI should look in a million years is probably something that is truly decentralized, really embedded in the fabric of the universe. That is our starting point.
I'm mainly interested in the physical side and the part of making robots intelligent, but also let's say the environments connecting to devices like robots. That is where I saw the biggest potential of first deploying it as much as possible on the edge, because that is also where it plays a large role, adjusting it and adding intelligence. I think this is the topic I was thinking a lot about because today, if you look at the world, all companies are differentiating themselves by know-how. They know something better or different, or they have a different way of producing things, and that makes them unique and gives them a reason to exist. We don't want to take that away from them. We want to build a global intelligence, a basic knowledge of understanding environments and physics. We don't want one brain that knows everything. The best way is to let them keep their knowledge and add it at the right time. I call it a brain account. Everyone will have their own brain account, just like everyone has a wallet in the future. You add knowledge from all kinds of companies because they train their devices, and then you can distribute it, let other robots participate, and have a payment system behind this. As a company, we thought about this a lot before we met you. When we started talking with your teams, I thought, wow, this can actually become a reality because there is someone thinking from the other side completely: the whole payment system, but also the whole peer-to-peer communication and edge computing without limitations. That is why I was super happy to meet you and start this.
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Ardoino, P. (2026, July 2). NEURA Robotics Executive Talk | Paolo Ardoino (CEO of Tether) on Physical AI [Interview transcript]. NEURA Robotics. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059183/
MLA
Paolo Ardoino. "NEURA Robotics Executive Talk | Paolo Ardoino (CEO of Tether) on Physical AI." NEURA Robotics, 2 Jul. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059183/.
BibTeX
@misc{ardoino2026_1059183,
author = {Paolo Ardoino},
title = {NEURA Robotics Executive Talk | Paolo Ardoino (CEO of Tether) on Physical AI},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, NEURA Robotics. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1059183/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
