CES 2026 | Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Fabio Puglia | LATMG & Oversonic Robotics

Hi, I'm Faith Pino at CES 2026 in Las Vegas at the Foundry. Joined now by two very special guests. First, Dr. Patrick Soon-shiong, the owner of LA Times and the founder of NantWorks that has just partnered with Fabio Pulia of Oversonic Robotics, an Italian company focused on advanced collaborative robotics. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Now, Fabio, I'm going to start with you first. This year at CES 2026, you all have brought two models to Las Vegas. Now, the R series and the M series. Can you break down for me what is the difference between these two models?

Well, the R series has been studied for industrial application while the M series has been done for healthcare application, but they both share the same platform because behind the robot there is a cognitive platform which is able to train the robot and to manage the robot while they are running and all the AI is there and is the cognitive part of our robots. Then the industrial robot is already able to do a lot of use cases. We already sold many of them and they usually do pick and place activities in facilities. But what is really important is that is fully autonomous because our aim is that this kind of robots has an own cognitive layer which enables them to be autonomous to interact let's say in a clever way semantically with the environment. So who buys our robots knows that he can let the robot do by itself the use case and the robot is aware of what is going on all around. While in the use cases in the industry we have a process in front, in the healthcare everything is more complex because the robot has to face with the environment with people with patients and is also really amazing. So our AI has been enabled to give this robot the cognitiveness to do this but we have also a let's say we call it a deterministic layer because the robot has to select what to do but then you need a field bus that does exactly what the robot need to do. So I think that this kind of vision at this stage is really really the best one to apply to our robots, our humanoids and moreover the fact that you can interact also with voice with robots. It's really an added value in the interaction. So a real human robot interaction with this for sure the future of this kind of machines.

A human robot interaction in a health care space would that mean that a patient would be talking to one of these humanoid robots like a doctor?

Yeah, in some way yeah because they can have a suggestion from the robot but also the robot can say the patient what the patient has to do and that's very important and is I say disruptive because usually AI is generic maybe you can do you should do no the robot can say to the patient this is the right way this is the wrong way please follow me and that's very very very important.

Dr. Soon-shiong, I'm going to hand over a question to you. You've chosen to partner with this technology. Can you tell me from your perspective after a long storied career in the medical field how you think this technology will revolutionize the healthcare space?