Sept. 9, 2026, Montreal — Industrial automation platform provider Vention has announced the opening of its physical AI lab in Montreal. Led by Jimmy Li, Vention’s director of physical AI, and advised by Joelle Pineau, chief AI officer at Cohere, the lab will focus on robotic manipulation for manufacturing, including industrial goods, electronics and automotive production. The lab’s research agenda combines industrial data collection, robotics control, motion planning, classical computer vision, vision foundation models, learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning, aimed at manufacturing tasks that are complex and unstructured. The lab has already generated new intellectual property and will continue to as this work advances. The mandate is scalable deployment: validating new physical AI capabilities against the reliability, cost and variability requirements of real production lines. As the underlying models mature, Vention expects the complexity costs of deploying to drop, widening the range of manufacturers who can put physical AI to work on their floors. Physical AI is Vention’s fastest-growing segment, with related revenue up 400 per cent over the past year. “Physical AI will fundamentally expand what manufacturers can automate, but the challenge is no longer simply proving that a robot can perform a task in a lab,” said Etienne Lacroix, founder and chief executive officer of Vention, in a media release. “The real opportunity is making these capabilities reliable, economical and deployable across thousands of factories. By combining Canada’s world-class AI ecosystem with Vention’s deep robotics expertise, industrial data and full-stack automation platform, we have a unique foundation to close that gap.” Li is a robotics and machine learning researcher from McGill University who brings more than a decade of peer-reviewed research experience and deep expertise in computer vision, robot perception, autonomous systems and AI-powered robotic manipulation. Over the past two years, he has spearheaded Vention’s physical AI strategy and led its technical collaboration with NVIDIA, translating advances in AI research into commercial robotic applications deployed on factory floors.