Why Physical AI Is Farming's Next Frontier with Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell

In this episode of Shift AI, Paul Mikesell, CEO of Carbon Robotics, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide-ranging conversation on how AI, lasers, and autonomy are replacing chemical weed control on farms. Carbon Robotics built a foundation model out of 150 million plant images, and Paul explains what happens when you show it a weed it has never encountered before. There's no retraining involved, and the result is something closer to a machine that understands what a plant is rather than one that's just memorized a dataset. What that actually looks like in the field, and why it took years of accumulated data to get there, is worth hearing him walk through directly. This episode is for CTOs and engineering leaders working on physical AI and robotics, agtech investors and founders, and anyone building computer vision systems that need to generalize beyond their training data. Chapters [00:01] Welcome to the show [00:31] From self-driving cars at Uber to founding Carbon Robotics [02:54] The farmer's real problem: weeds, chemicals, and health risks [04:05] Paper routes, Nintendo, and a Commodore 64: Paul's path into computing [07:59] Laser Weeder by the numbers: 15 countries and $100M+ in revenue [10:04] Inside the machine: light brighter than the sun and real-time targeting [13:33] The tractor driver bottleneck and the move to autonomy [14:55] Center pivots and near-misses: what farms teach robots that roads don't [18:40] The real moat: people, data, and years in the field [20:31] The Large Plant Model: recognizing a weed it's never seen before [24:23] Physical AI and why data is becoming the new moat [26:57] Two words for the future: autonomy and health Connect with Paul Mikesell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-mikesell-4b63a9/ Company: carbonrobotics.com Connect with Boaz Ashkenazy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boazashkenazy/ Email: info@shiftai.fm