Mind Robotics appoints Doug Field president to lead industrial robot development

Mind Robotics appoints Doug Field president to lead industrial robot development

Mind Robotics, founded in 2025 by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, has appointed former Ford EV and software chief Doug Field as president. Field previously helped oversee Tesla's Model 3 and led Apple's ultimately unsuccessful autonomous-car project. He will oversee Mind's effort to build robots for industrial work, including applications in Rivian factories. Scaringe remains acting CEO and chair. Mind has raised more than $1 billion but has not publicly shown its robots or confirmed whether they will have a humanoid design.

The appointment brings vehicle-development experience to a physical-AI company whose central challenge is translating dexterity and physical reasoning into reliable factory work. In industrial robotics, the distinction between broad capability claims and repeatable task performance matters more than the robot's form. Rivian provides a concrete deployment setting: it supplies AI training data, owns equity in Mind and will be the first customer, with initial testing planned in its factories. That relationship gives Mind access to an operating environment for learning, although the article provides no evidence of production readiness or commercial performance.

For builders and investors, the next useful evidence is factory-level execution: which tasks the robots complete, how often people must intervene and whether deployment improves throughput or operating costs. Field's appointment strengthens the leadership team, but it does not establish those outcomes. Rivian's position as both shareholder and first customer also makes results at independent customer sites an important eventual test of whether Mind's capabilities transfer beyond its initial deployment environment.

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