They helped make Waymo go. Now they're building AI-powered robots to solve America's labor crisis

Fast Company

23-07-2025

America's demand for new infrastructure is surging, driven by the AI data center boom, clean energy projects, and a growing national housing crunch. Yet just as the country needs to build faster than ever, it's facing a mounting challenge: a severe construction labor shortage. The U.S. construction industry is already short more than half a million workers, and nearly 41% of its workforce is expected to retire by 2031. For a sector still heavily dependent on manual labor and analog tools, there soon may not be enough people left to do the building.
To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman—a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive—cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous.
Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world's most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower.
'I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,' Sofman tells Fast Company. 'We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.'