The automation industry grew up project by project, facility by facility. Companies acquired other companies, gave them a new name, put them on shared financial systems, and called it a group. Engineering teams stayed separate. Customer relationships stayed local. The knowledge and experience that accumulated in one facility had no reliable path to another, and customers who engaged one part of a large automation group had no practical way to access the expertise sitting in a different part of the same organization.
For customers, this created a real and persistent ceiling. The quality of their automation partner was effectively bounded by the capabilities of the specific team they happened to engage. A manufacturer in the midwest worked with the midwest team. If the deepest expertise in their particular production challenge sat with a specialist team in England, that expertise stayed in England. The customer never knew what they were missing, and the automation group had no structural incentive to change it.
Automated Industrial Robotics (AIR) was deliberately structured to break that ceiling from the start. AIR was founded in 2023 by Brian Klos, Executive Chairman, and Darragh de Stonndún, CEO, supported by long-term strategic investment enabling continued growth. When a customer brings a production challenge to AIR, the first conversation is about the solution. The engineering resources required to deliver the best answer are assembled from across the organization, wherever they sit. A team in one country working alongside specialists from another is a core part of how AIR operates. The customer gets access to expertise across AIR's organization, not just the depth of one facility's history.
What Customers Actually Experience
This model only works if the people across those facilities are genuinely and consistently oriented around collaboration. A wall-less organization requires people who operate without territorial instincts, who share knowledge freely, and who measure their own success by the quality of the outcome rather than the visibility of their individual contribution. AIR's approach to building and acquiring teams reflects this understanding at every level of the organization.
Cultural alignment is a key consideration in AIR's acquisition approach, evaluated before technical capability in every company AIR considers. A team with strong engineering credentials but a protective, siloed culture will undermine the integrated model the company depends on. A team with genuine collaborative instincts and solid technical foundations can grow powerfully within it. That filter has shaped every acquisition decision since AIR was founded, and it is the reason the company is positioned to deliver customers an integrated experience rather than just an integrated org chart.
Internally, AIR reinforces these values through recognition programs that reward selflessness and collective value creation over title and tenure. The behaviors that make the integrated model work get celebrated visibly and consistently, which in turn attracts more people who operate that way and gradually strengthens the culture that makes everything else possible.
AIR's all-in engagement cycle runs from initial exploration and production design through commissioning and continuous optimization. Customers work alongside AIR engineers throughout the entire process, with visibility into key decisions and progress at every stage. For manufacturers scaling complex production across multiple facilities, the integrated model delivers something genuinely valuable: a consistent approach across sites and systems, with the same organizational knowledge, engineering standards, and commitment to production outcomes applied at every phase of the project. AIR focuses on delivering value through integrated engineering while maintaining strict customer confidentiality and safeguarding customer IP.
When a customer asks where their project will be built, AIR's answer is that the first question is what solution best serves their production goals. Then the expertise gets assembled from wherever it sits across the company. For most manufacturers used to working with regional automation teams, that answer is surprising. For those who experience the results it produces, it changes what they expect from every engagement that follows. AIR is building the automation company the industry has needed for a long time, and the customers working with it today are starting to see exactly what that means in practice.
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