The merging of robotics and AI in automation present a wave of opportunities for investors, but the next wildcard can be overseas. R "Ray" Wang, Principal Analyst & Founder of Constellation Research, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how geopolitical competition is going to play a hand in the robotics industry.

“Think about China. Their population dynamics are shrinking over time,” Wang said. “They need robots to keep up.”

It all comes down to who can take advantage of automation most effectively and quickly, Wang said.

For more from this episode of NEXT:
To see the full NEXT episode: Inside Amazon's robot empire, click here.
To read Alexandra Garfinkle's article: Amazon built the retail of today — its robots are building the Amazon of tomorrow, click here.

Video Transcript

- Ray, robotics won't just impact company to company competition. You're expecting it to impact geopolitical competition. How might robotics transform the US-China dynamic moving forward.

RAY WANG: Oh, it's a big factor, right? I mean, you think about China, their population dynamics are shrinking over time. They need robots to be able to keep up. They're going to look like Japan in 20 years in terms of their age demographic. And you're going to see a lot more of that automation that's going to come into place.

And the US at least we still have immigration and a good supply of labor, even though it's been very, very tight. And in terms of competition, we actually have to be able to catch up from anything from automating in the way ports operate to automating what actually happens in the last mile in terms of the distribution, in terms of transportation management, and warehouse management. Those are coming into play.

And I think that's, really the big competition is really our ability to actually move more goods more quickly, and be able to do it at lower cost, and be able to take, take advantage of more cycles that are being offered when we get to automation. Because automation allows you to get the 24/7. The robots play a key role in doing that. And whoever can actually compete more quickly to be able to do that is going to win in the geopolitical wars.