01 October 2026 | News
Image Courtesy: Public Domain
ANYbotics, a global leader in AI-driven robotic inspection solutions, announced the launch of ANYbotics Shift™, the new operational engine powering the company's autonomous inspection solutions. Designed to simplify asset health assessments and enable downtime-minimizing preventive maintenance, Shift connects a facility’s plant model, robot fleet, inspection intelligence data, and maintenance systems into one continuous workflow. The new platform empowers businesses to harness the full potential of autonomous inspection by planning and running multi-robot missions, while organizing captured field data directly around existing asset management infrastructure.
Undetected failures cost the world's 500 largest companies an estimated $1.4 trillion each year in preventable downtime, with a single hour of outage averaging $250,000. ANYbotics addresses this challenge by deploying autonomous robots that collect hundreds of thousands of inspection data points every month. This continuous data stream creates something unprecedented in process industry operations: a comparable inspection baseline across every asset over time. By tracking this baseline, reliability engineers can clearly see an asset’s degradation curve and intervene before a minor anomaly escalates into a multi-million-dollar shutdown.
As industrial sites scale from single robots to full fleets, the challenge shifts from what individual machines can inspect to how whole fleets operate, focusing on rapid site deployment, team-wide adoption, and seamless integration into maintenance workflows. Built specifically for this transition, Shift optimizes the four pillars of fleet success: deployment speed, role-based adoption, asset intelligence, and workflow integration. Setup tasks that once took specialists weeks can now be completed by local technicians in days, while raw sensor data is automatically transformed into prioritized work orders.
“Robotic inspection delivers the most value when field data flows directly into maintenance action," says Péter Fankhauser, Co-Founder and CEO of ANYbotics. "Shift makes that seamless. It unifies plant mapping, robot fleet coordination, inspection AI analytics, and systems integrations into one platform. At its core, Shift AI powers the intelligence that transforms field findings into work orders, saving millions in avoiding unplanned downtime.”
How Shift™ Works
Operations teams run their entire robot fleet from one place: scheduling missions, monitoring status, battery and position via live video to ensure the robots deliver the right readings from the right assets at the right frequency. Reliability teams can review inspection results and receive notifications when the system identifies an anomaly. Integration teams can use the Shift API to feed this unique inspection data into their existing maintenance, enterprise, and asset-performance systems. This enables information to flow in both directions. Customer systems can trigger and schedule robot missions, while Shift sends inspection results and alerts back into the tools teams are already using.
At its core, Shift AI serves as a shared intelligence layer that continuously learns from and feeds into every connected module. Because all four modules operate on the same living model of the plant, every data reading retains its asset context, precise location, and operational history, meaning every inspection automatically enriches the entire platform. On this foundation, Shift delivers visibility, action, and measurable impact through four interconnected modules designed to operate as a single, unified system:
Shift Fleet takes the friction out of scaling from one robot to a full fleet, keeping robots on repetitive inspection duty while your reliability engineers stay in the driver's seat, reviewing findings, prioritizing repairs, and deciding what to fix. It schedules, monitors, and controls your entire robot fleet from one place. Missions can be triggered directly from your distributed control system (DCS), ensuring critical assets are inspected consistently without adding workload to stretched teams.
Shift Insight combines thermal, acoustic, visual, and gas readings with operating conditions like motor speed, load, and ambient temperature. A reading only counts as an anomaly when the context says it should, surfacing overheating, partial discharge, leaks, and misalignment while they are still relatively harmless.
Shift Connect turns confirmed anomalies directly into work orders inside your core operational software. Through productized connectors and standard REST APIs, Connect integrates seamlessly across five key categories: Distributed Control Systems (DCS) like Yokogawa; Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools like SAP and IBM Maximo; Asset Performance Management (APM) platforms such as GE Vernova APM; and digital twin or contextualization layers like Cognite and Oracle. This bi-directional integration allows process thresholds to automatically trigger new robot inspection rounds, while an integrated notification center delivers real-time alerts through everyday tools like email and Microsoft Teams, with SMS and WhatsApp support coming next.
Shift Maps provides a live digital twin of your plant. It uses your existing asset hierarchy (from asset to section to unit) and maps inspection targets into your asset performance management (APM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) infrastructures. Importing asset structures by asset ID, so every reading lands on the right piece of equipment.
Jacob Euler-Rolle, Head of Product Management, Workflow Integration at ANYbotics, adds: “Shift AI connects all four modules and is the shared intelligence they all work on. A reading doesn't just get stored, it arrives knowing which asset it belongs to, where that asset sits, what it looked like last time, and which work order it should become. The plant model from Maps, the inspection task from Fleet, the interpretation from Insight, and the action from Connect are one continuous workflow. And it runs both ways: a work order or a process alarm can send the fleet straight back to the asset. Every cycle through that workflow feeds Shift AI, which makes the next one smarter.”
Shift runs as a managed cloud platform operated by ANYbotics, with regional hosting so customer data resides where it is required, for example in the EU or the United States. For specific IT/OT or regulatory requirements, Shift can also be deployed in a customer's own cloud environment or, where necessary, on-premise. Customer inspection data remains fully owned by the customer and is handled in strict compliance with data protection laws, including the GDPR. ANYbotics holds a ISO 27001 certification and its ANYmal robots carry CE, IP67, ATEX, and IECEx certifications.
For existing ANYbotics customers, the transition from Data Navigator (ANYbotics’ existing asset management platform) to Shift is completely seamless and requires no action. With the upcoming regular platform update, Data Navigator will automatically become Shift, carrying over all existing data, configurations, integrations, and custom workflows without disruption. Because there is no migration project or technical overhead required, teams can simply log in and continue working as usual, benefiting from a refreshed platform identity, alongside the platform’s new, expanded capabilities.
Over the coming months, ANYbotics plans to expand Shift’s capabilities beyond ANYmal hardware to support third-party robotic systems to position Shift as a hardware-agnostic command center for heterogeneous robotic workforces. Shift's API-first architecture also establishes it as a foundation for industrial AI agents to orchestrate robot fleets, assign tasks dynamically, and utilize inspection intelligence across broader plant automation workflows.
Customer info and quotes:
Shift is deployed across more than 200 robot deployments and runs hundreds of thousands of inspections every month. That operational depth, built from real plants rather than software, is what sets it apart from generic robotic fleet management tools.
At SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District), the platform saved more than $3.5 million in its first months of operation on critical substation assets by flagging overheating conductors, partial discharge, and gas leaks that manual rounds had missed.
Similarly, at a Vigier Cement plant running 24/7, Shift executed over 33,000 autonomous inspections in 16 months, structuring every reading against the plant's asset hierarchy so the maintenance team could compare condition trends over time and prioritize repairs.
“ANYbotics Shift's API gives our APM platform consistent, valuable equipment-level inspection data from across the plant floor. Combining field insights with our analytics creates a more complete picture of asset health, helping teams identify, validate, and address issues more effectively. When our models flag a potential issue, we can use the same API to send robots to verify it and capture additional context. The integration has been seamless, making it easy to incorporate field insights into existing workflows and accelerate value for our customers.” - Neha Joshi, Product Leader, GE VERNOVA APM
“Shift makes it easy for SAP to integrate robot inspections into business processes. Physical AI on SAP Business AI Platform translates a business need into a Shift mission, with results stored back in SAP for follow ups like maintenance order creation. Robot inspection missions through Shift enhance SAP's Autonomous Supply Chain for asset & field service with robot execution.” - Adelya Fatykhova, Global Lead Architect Embodied AI Agents, Physical AI, and Robotics, SAP
"We run metals plants in several countries, and every site used to inspect in its own way. Shift gives us one platform and one view of asset condition across steel, aluminium and copper. We proved it on a single line, and because the data is structured the same way everywhere, we extend it plant by plant without starting over." — Vasilis Zogogiannis, Senior Director of Operational Excellence, Steelmet (Viohalco Group)
"We build, operate and service energy-from-waste plants, and our digital services only work when the field data is structured and reliable. Shift runs the inspection rounds for us and brings every reading together in one place, so it has become part of how we deliver digital services to our own customers." — Julie Clavier, Director Digital Service Solutions, Kanadevia Inova
