TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s Real World AI Stage features robots, automated factories, and extinct animals

TechCrunch is splitting its AI programming in two this year, and the split says something about where the industry's attention has actually moved. The original AI Stage sticks around for the software side of things — security gaps, business models, the usual SaaS disruption talk. But the new Real World AI Stage, debuting at Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco from October 13 to 15, is built entirely around AI that has to survive contact with reality: gravity, supply chains, battlefields, and in one case, extinction.

The lineup leans hard into stakes. Shield AI's CTO Nate Michael will talk about building autonomous systems where failure isn't an inconvenience but a grounded aircraft or a botched mission. Dr. Ali Agha of FieldAI, along with Medra's Michelle Lee and Eclipse Ventures partner Aidan Madigan-Curtis, will dig into AI that has to work without the cloud — in space, underground, or wherever latency and connectivity simply don't cooperate. That's a very different engineering problem than fine-tuning a model with a stable internet connection and a retry button.

Then there's the scaling panel, which might be the most useful session for anyone actually running a hardware startup. MBRYONICS' John Mackey, Bedrock Robotics' Boris Sofman, and Foxglove's Adrian Macneil will get into the unglamorous truth that a working prototype and a shippable product are two completely different companies, and that most deep tech startups die somewhere in that gap once real manufacturing and supply chains replace lab conditions.

And then there's Ben Lamm. Colossal Biosciences' CEO has turned de-extinction into a genuine business, and his fireside chat promises to wade into whether reviving lost species is a legitimate conservation tool or an expensive distraction dressed up in AI and biotech buzzwords. It's an odd fit next to defense drones and edge computing, but that's kind of the point of this new stage — it's chasing the places where AI is leaving the screen and getting its hands dirty, extinct woolly mammoths included.