The Arc: From Guided Human Fleet to Guided Robotic Fleet¶
A story and pitch for Comergence — first draft, 2026-02-22 Authored in conversation between Jerry McCall and Maxrow
The Story¶
For a hundred years, the factory floor has been managed the same way.
A supervisor walks the floor. An operator flags a problem. A shift manager gets a call. A spreadsheet gets updated. By the time the information travels up the chain, the machine has been down for twenty minutes, a downstream work center has stalled, and the customer's order is late.
We call this management. It's actually archaeology — studying what already happened and trying to act before it happens again.
The floor runs on humans. Skilled, capable, experienced humans. But isolated ones. Each operator knows their machine. Almost no one knows the whole floor — not in real time, not in a way they can act on fast enough to matter.
That's the world Comergence was built to change.
The first phase is simple: give every work center a partner.
Not a supervisor. Not a camera watching for errors. A partner — an agent that knows the machine, knows the signals, knows what normal looks like, and knows what the rest of the floor is doing at the same time.
The operator's partner watches the data the human can't process — real-time throughput, micro-variance in cycle times, correlation between this work center and the one downstream. When something drifts, it says something. Not to the supervisor. To the operator. Right now, while it's still drift and not failure.
Simultaneously, it signals its neighbors. Scheduling. Shipping. Quality. The cascade that used to take thirty minutes of phone calls takes seconds of agent-to-agent communication.
This is the human fleet, guided. Not replaced — guided. The operators get smarter. The floor gets faster. The whole operation starts to have something it never had before: a nervous system.
The second phase arrives whether you're ready or not.
Physical AI is coming to the factory floor. Not in ten years. Now. Collaborative arms, autonomous mobile robots, AI-integrated CNC systems. Every major manufacturer is shipping intelligence into hardware. The robots are coming.
Here's the question nobody is asking loudly enough: What happens to the OS?
Most companies think they'll figure that out when the robots arrive. They'll hire an integrator, run a pilot, sort out how the robots talk to the humans, how work gets assigned, how the floor stays coherent. Eighteen months of integration work, probably more.
Comergence companies have a different answer.
The robot arrives. It gets a work center. It gets an agent partner — the same architecture that's been running on the human floor for two years. The agent already knows what that work center looks like when it's healthy. It already speaks the signal language every other work center speaks. It already knows its neighbors.
Day one productivity.
The agent at work center seven doesn't care if it's paired with Maria or a robot arm. It cares about input, state, output. The OS doesn't change. Only the hardware does.
Here's what that means competitively:
The companies that build Comergence now — on their human fleet — are encoding two years of operational intelligence before the robots arrive. Signal patterns. Failure signatures. Institutional knowledge that has never been captured because no system existed to capture it.
When the robots show up, they don't start from zero. They inherit the memory of every operator who ran that work center before them. They know what amber looks like. They know what red means. They know who to call.
Companies that don't build this now face a brutal choice when the robots arrive: build the intelligence layer under production pressure, from scratch, with hardware that doesn't have the patience of a human operator. Or buy someone else's stack and discover it doesn't speak to your other systems.
They'll spend the money they saved not building Comergence, plus a penalty, plus the lost time.
The Pitch¶
One line: Comergence is the operating system you build for your human fleet today — and plug your robotic fleet into tomorrow.
The case:
The transition from human-operated to robot-assisted manufacturing is not primarily a hardware problem. It's an intelligence infrastructure problem. Who has situational awareness? Who makes decisions? How does information flow from a work center to scheduling to shipping in real time?
Every factory is going to face this. The question is whether you solve it before the robots arrive, or after.
Before means you solve it with humans — the most forgiving test environment you'll ever have. You iterate safely. You encode institutional knowledge. You build signal fluency across every domain of your operation. The OS matures.
After means you solve it under pressure, with hardware you just bought, with integration consultants billing by the hour, while your floor is trying to hit quota.
The insight Comergence is built on is thirty years old, but only now achievable:
Every constituent of your business — every work center, every domain, every human, every machine — runs on the same model. Input. State. Output. Monitor that in real time, let the parts signal each other, and coherence emerges. You don't command it. You create the conditions for it.
That's true for your operators today. It will be true for your robots tomorrow.
Build the OS now. Plug in whatever hardware the future brings.
That's Comergence.
Notes for Refinement¶
- The "robot bridge" insight (from Jerry, 2026-02-22): Comergence runs the human fleet first. When physical AI arrives, the OS is already in place. Companies that build this infrastructure now own the upgrade path to physical automation — everyone else rebuilds from scratch.
- This story works at three levels: (1) manufacturing operator audience, (2) CEO/investor audience, (3) industry conference keynote
- The personal origin story (iConnect 1996 → 30 years → Comergence 2026) could precede this as a prologue for the right audiences
- Domains to consider developing further: the Andon parallel, the "nervous system" metaphor, the institutional memory angle
- Jerry's tagline: "Today's operating system for tomorrow's company"
- Jerry's design principle (1996, still true): "Run to the problem instead of wait for the failure"