Robotics & Physical AI

What contracts and sites require

A pilot agreement with a warehouse, hospital or utility almost always carries an insurance exhibit. The usual asks are general liability at $1M per occurrence and $2M aggregate with the customer as additional insured, workers' compensation with a waiver of subrogation for your people on their floor, and sometimes a $5M umbrella when the site is a hospital or a utility. Enterprise customers add tech E&O and cyber once the machine touches their systems.

Landlords want the same general liability certificate before you sign for the lab, and property coverage for the build-out. Contract manufacturers and integrators write their own insurance clauses into the supply agreement, and a customer's procurement team will read those clauses against yours.

The certificate is the document the customer's risk manager actually files. A wrong entity name or a missing endorsement reference sends it back, and the machine waits on the dock while it does.

What it costs

We don't publish a number. Premiums come back from the carriers' underwriters for your operation, and any figure we printed here would be a guess dressed as a fact.

What we can say is what moves the price. Underwriters read the operating envelope, the supervision model, the speed and mass of the machine, the population around it, and the safety case. A submission that answers those questions before they are asked routinely prices where a generic form gets declined.

What to watch for in the wording

Read the general liability form for any exclusion that names autonomous operation, unmanned equipment, or artificial intelligence. Standard-form generative AI exclusions exist for both the general liability coverage part and the products and completed operations coverage part (the AI exclusions tracker lists each one with its source), and a carrier can attach either by endorsement. The exclusion does not announce itself at purchase. It sits in the paper until a claim arrives.

Then read the definition of your product. A products and completed operations claim, where the machine you sold injures someone after delivery, is answered by general liability only if the form's definition of your product reaches a machine running a model that keeps learning. Tech E&O answers the financial loss when the machine gets the job wrong, and its definition of technology services needs to reach a physical output as well as software.

Equipment coverage is the line most often written too narrowly. A schedule that lists three robots covers three robots, and the fourth one on a truck to a pilot next month is uninsured until someone calls. Ask for a blanket limit with automatic acquisition, and check the territory and the in-transit language.

How to buy it

Tell us what the machine does, where it operates, who is around it and how it is supervised, in plain English. The application builds a submission written for machines in the field, and a licensed broker takes it to the insurers who cover autonomy explicitly.

Quotes come back with the forms attached. We read every endorsement and every exclusion before anything binds, tell you in plain words what each policy responds to, and issue certificates to the customer's exact requirements once it does. Updates arrive in Slack and email until the program is in place.