Every great automation project starts with an idea. But the real challenge is turning that idea into reality, a process that demands hundreds of decisions, each carrying long-term consequences. When you invest in automation, you’re not just buying equipment. You’re defining how your operations will run for years to come. Every choice can shape your ROI, impact your timeline, and determine the success of your project.
That’s why Vention created Zero Shot Automation™: automation that gets it right the first time. By uniting AI-powered design, simulation, and deployment on one full-stack platform, we help organizations navigate complexity, make better decisions, and launch automation that works from day one.
What is Zero Shot Automation™?
In the world of artificial intelligence, most models are only as good as the data they’ve been trained on. Traditional approaches require large, task-specific datasets and repeated fine-tuning before an AI system can deliver accurate results. This makes them powerful, but also rigid: every new challenge demands new training.
Zero-shot learning offers a different path. Instead of retraining for every scenario, zero-shot models apply existing knowledge to new tasks, making inferences without ever having seen the problem before. The promise is clear: faster adaptability, less reliance on custom datasets, and the ability to generalize across contexts.
Zero Shot Automation™ takes this principle from the digital world into the physical one.
Unlike conventional automation—where costly redesigns, customization, and trial-and-error are common, Zero Shot Automation™ is built on Vention’s standardized, modular components and validated design patterns. The result is automation that “gets it right the first time”, launching faster and with greater certainty from day one.
With data from thousands of successful deployments, our platform doesn’t start at zero. It starts with accumulated expertise. AI-powered design assistance, physics-based simulation, and modular hardware combine to predict what will work for your specific application before a single order is placed or a single part assembled.
The outcome is transformative: automation that launches faster, performs reliably from day one, and delivers predictable ROI, not after months of adjustment, but from the very start. That’s the promise of Zero Shot Automation™ with Vention.
Design. Simulate. Deploy: The Zero-Shot Workflow
At the core of Zero Shot Automation™ is a streamlined, full-stack approach that brings together hardware, software, and AI into a single, seamless experience. With Vention’s platform, automation projects follow a simple yet powerful workflow:
1. Design Smarter with MachineBuilder™: From Browser to Factory Floor
In traditional automation, design is often a guessing game. Engineers work in siloed CAD environments, rely on external and costly specialists, and spend weeks stitching together components, only to face uncertainty about whether their designs will actually perform on the factory floor. The result is a slow, fragmented process filled with dependencies, revisions, and risk.
MachineBuilder™ changes that. As the industry’s first cloud-native design environment for automation, it launches directly in your browser, requiring no software installations or steep learning curves. Its modular architecture and intuitive drag-and-drop interface ensure component compatibility, while hundreds of pre-built, customizable templates give teams a head start on proven designs.
But the real breakthrough lies in AI-powered design assistance. Just as zero-shot learning enables AI to tackle new challenges without retraining, MachineBuilder’s built-in AI assistant helps you design automation that’s right the first time. It suggests compatible parts, completes assemblies, and validates designs in real time, reducing the risk of errors before they ever reach the factory floor.
With collaborative features, live technical specs, and instant Bills of Materials, teams can move from idea to order in a matter of days. That’s the essence of Zero Shot Automation™. Designs that aren’t just faster to create, but more reliable from the start.
2. Simulate for Certainty with MachineLogic
If zero-shot learning is about solving new problems without retraining, then Zero Shot Automation™ is about solving automation without rework. The key to making that possible is simulation.
With Vention’s MachineLogic™, every design is paired with a physics-accurate digital twin that replicates how your machine will behave in the real world. This isn’t a visual mockup or an animation—it’s a true-to-life environment where motion, force, and timing are validated before a single bolt is turned or a dollar is spent. If it works in simulation, it works on your shop floor.
Simulation also redefines how programming is done. Whether you’re building automation with no-code blocks, low-code logic, or advanced Python, MachineLogic lets every member of your team validate your machine before deployment, without fear of costly errors. And with the help of an AI-powered copilot that writes, edits, and debugs code in real time, programming becomes less about trial and error and more about acceleration and assurance. The result is a shift in mindset: from hoping your system will perform once deployed, to knowing it will.
3. Deploy in Just a Few Clicks
Designing and simulating is only half of the challenge. The true test is deployment—when a virtual machine must perform flawlessly in the real world. Traditionally, this stage is riddled with complexity: manual wiring, configuring communication protocols, integrating disparate hardware, and countless hours of debugging. Each step introduces risk, delay, and cost.
With Vention’s MachineMotion™ AI, all of that friction disappears. As the industry’s first AI-native automation controller, it unifies robots, actuators, and sensors into one unified environment. Once your design has been validated in simulation, deploying it is just one click away. Whether over Wi-Fi, LAN, or LTE, your complete configuration and program transfer instantly to the controller. No more rewiring, protocol headaches, or uncertainty.
Since MachineMotion AI mirrors your digital twin exactly, what works in simulation is precisely what runs on the factory floor. Motion logic, safety parameters, and even custom HMIs are preloaded from the cloud, transforming deployment from weeks of setup into minutes of activation.
This is the defining strength of Zero Shot Automation™: eliminating trial and error so automation performs with certainty the moment it goes live.
Extending Zero Shot Automation™ to Physical AI
While Zero Shot Automation™ reimagines design, simulation, and deployment of machines that “just work” on the first try, Physical AI extends that same certainty to unstructured, real-world tasks.
For decades, robots have struggled with variability—bins of parts in varying shapes, lighting conditions, and orientations. Each variation demanded reprogramming, making these tasks too costly and impractical to automate.
Vention’s AI Operator changes that.
Powered by MachineMotion™ AI with embedded GPU processing, AI Operator uses AI-driven perception, dexterity, and context-aware motion planning to give robots the ability to see, adapt, and act in dynamic environments. Instead of hard-coded paths, the AI Operator generates grasp plans on the fly, handles variations in real time, and executes tasks like bin picking, kitting, or machine tending—without the need for robotics expertise.
The result is automation that applies the Zero-Shot principles beyond design and deployment into execution itself. By reducing reliance on specialized programming and adapting continuously to real-world variability, the AI Operator becomes not just a machine, but a true teammate that can work 24/7, scale with demand, and pay for itself in months.
This is the next frontier of Zero Shot Automation™: not just getting machines right the first time, but ensuring they stay right as production changes.
Full-Stack Automation Platform with Built-In AI
In a recent interview outlining Vention’s AI strategy, CEO Etienne Lacroix summed up the current state of industrial automation in one sentence: “There’s nothing more manual than industrial automation.” The culprit? The sophisticated and custom workflows that live in individual silos across hundreds of thousands of factory floors. This is where platforming offers a breakthrough in making manufacturing automation more accessible and more valuable.
Vention’s full-stack platform unites design, simulation, programming, and deployment under one comprehensive system that is already transforming how manufacturers automate.
Consider Harris RCS, an aerospace engineering company that leveraged Vention’s MachineBuilder™ software to design and simulate their mobile cobot machine tending setup quickly and efficiently. The full-stack platform allowed them to validate their design before any capital expenditure, track their budget in real-time, and order compatible hardware seamlessly.
The speed advantages of a full-stack platform are equally compelling. The Feed, a leader in sport nutrition products, designed, programmed, and deployed a custom conveying solution in just six weeks—six to eight times faster than traditional automation approaches. This acceleration demonstrates how unified platforms can eliminate the delays inherent in fragmented automation workflows.
Unlike other tools that leave manufacturers juggling incompatible systems, this full-stack approach ensures seamless integration across every part of the workflow. The integration of AI takes this capability even further, delivering faster deployments, more reliable performance, and the core advantage of Zero Shot Automation™.
Design with AI, Program with AI, and Deploy AI-Powered Robots
Generative AI adoption in manufacturing is still in its early stages—just five percent of manufacturers in the Global AI Survey by McKinsey reported using it for their operations. This is set to change dramatically with the rise of Zero Shot Automation™. A key driver of this shift is the integration of AI throughout the automation journey, not merely as an add-on.
Vention’s approach to AI embeds a ‘sixth sense’ into each step of the process. From design suggestions to real-time physical inference, Vention AI is with you every step of the way. You can also leverage it to turn robots into intelligent operators that can define movements themselves, without any need for manual code for each task. The result: up to three times faster deployment and cost savings in the hundreds of thousands by replacing expensive sensors with AI vision.
Ultimately, this built-in AI approach acts as a great equalizer, democratizing advanced automation by removing the need for extensive custom programming. It’s the fastest path to productizing manufacturing automation, enabling all manufacturers to begin their automation journeys with speed, simplicity, and success.
Future of Automation is Here: Experience Zero-Shot Automation in Demo Day 2025
Vention’s Zero Shot Automation™ is redefining the limits of industrial automation. Powered by a unified, AI-driven platform and a workflow built for speed, certainty, and simplicity, manufacturers can now launch complex automation projects in days, not months.
Curious to see how Zero Shot Automation™ can solve manufacturing challenges today? Join Vention for the biggest AI and automation reveals of the year in Demo Day 2025! Save your spot today to discover Zero Shot Automation™.
