Hive × Jotun · 2026

Physical AI · Live

Supervised physical AI · for Jotun

Self-driving forklifts and loaders for Jotun's factories.

Hive turns the forklifts and wheel loaders you already run into supervised, self-driving machines. Proven in heavy industry and harsh Nordic environments with Yara, Veidekke and Statens vegvesen. Now expanding across Europe and the US.

* Hive application at Veidekke, Espa

Why we are talking to Jotun

02 / 15

The paint-factory floor

Three flows on your floor. All forklift-bound. All repetitive.

A NOK 34bn paint business moves on pallets, IBCs and big bags. The point-to-point moves between dock, tank farm, warehouse and trailer repeat every shift. That is exactly where supervised autonomy fits, and where operators are hardest to staff at night and through the summer peak.

Raw materials in

1,000 L

Resin and solvent IBCs, big bags of pigment and filler, drums of binder. Heavy, repetitive counterbalanced moves from the unloading dock to the raw-material buffer.

Finished goods

5 high

Filled cans off the line, wrapped, into high-bay racking and floor storage. Fixed routes, standard pallets, every shift, all year.

Yard & loading

100+

Dock-to-trailer pallet moves for export to over 100 countries. Same pattern all day, indoor to outdoor, through a Norwegian winter.

We start where it is simplest and safest: sealed finished goods, the yard and loading. Solvent-zoned filling lines stay with your people until a certified retrofit makes sense.

Act I · A clear market trajectory

02 / 14

A clear market trajectory

Everybody wants to automate.

Warehouses, ports, terminals, yards. The destination is no longer in dispute — every operator at scale has an active automation initiative on the agenda.

25%

Warehouses with automation

A quarter of warehouses globally have implemented some form of automation. Only 10% use advanced automation technologies — most have started, almost none have arrived.

Source: Meteor Space, 2024

$18B

Projected global spend by 2027

Global capex earmarked for AGVs and AMRs by 2027. The money has been allocated across logistics, manufacturing and material-handling operators worldwide — the destination is not the question.

Source: PR Newswire

2.4M

Units installed base by 2027

Projected global installed base of AGV and AMR robots by 2027. The iron is being deployed at scale — the question is whether it actually replaces labour or just sits beside it.

Source: PR Newswire

Act II · The forcing function

03 / 14

The forcing function

Manual labour is constrained.

Automation is no longer optional because the alternative — hiring more operators — is not viable. Three constraints, all structural, all getting worse.

Supply

30–50%

Annual operator turnover in EU logistics. Workforce shrinking, aging out faster than replaced. Every rotation re-opens a productivity gap.

Cost

~70%

Of a 2-shift forklift's loaded TCO is the operator. Wages up 4–7% per year. Shift premiums, sickness cover and onboarding outpace machine cost.

Reliability

5×

Forklift-operator injury rate vs. average warehouse role. Shifts go uncovered. Safety incidents block throughput. Iron sits idle 34% of the time.

The labour you can hire isn't enough. The labour you can't hire is the bottleneck.

Act III · The honest problem

04 / 14

The honest problem

AMRs were supposed to replace labour. They can't. Yet.

Every operator who ran a pilot has met the same wall. The gap between what AMRs can do today and what they would need to do to viably replace human labour is large — and most operators blamed the robot.

What AMRs do today

Conveyor belts on wheels.

Fixed routes, pre-mapped environments
One task, one machine, one workflow
Structured floors only — no edge cases
Stops on exception, waits for a human
Per-task integration, per-vendor stack

Useful in narrow lanes. Not a labour replacement.

THE GAP

What replacing labour requires

What humans actually do.

Mixed tasks across the day, no script
Floor and yard, indoor and outdoor
Dynamic, messy, unstructured environments
Judgment under exception, no human nearby
Cross-equipment, cross-site generalization

The job an operator does on day one.

Act IV · Where Hive comes in

05 / 14

Where Hive comes in

Hive closes the gap with a physical AI model — not a fleet of single-purpose robots.

Today's AMRs → The Hive bridge ← Labour replacement

A general-purpose AI model trained across machine types, sites and conditions — running on the iron you already own, supervised by humans until the model owns the edge cases. Four pillars carry the bridge.

01

One model, every machine

A single AI model across the whole fleet.

Not a separate integration per machine type. Hive trains one model that generalizes across wheel loaders, haulers, excavators and forklifts. New tasks and new iron without starting from scratch.

02

Fully packaged service

Ops center, trained operators, 24/7 coverage.

Hive is not software you install. It is a packaged service. Operations center in Kristiansand, trained remote operators, redundant connectivity, 24/7 coverage. Nothing you replicate internally — unless you'd like your operators to step into supervision.

03

Human-in-the-loop by design

Supervision is the product, not the fallback.

When the AI hesitates, a trained remote operator takes over instantly. The edge cases that stop every other AMR are absorbed by the supervisor — and become the next training set.

04

Retrofit, not replacement

Runs on machines you already own.

Sensors, lidar and a control cabinet mounted on your existing fleet. Installed in days. From standard to supervised physical AI without new iron or a multi-year refresh cycle.

What you get

06 / 14

What you get

The Best of Both Worlds. The cost saving, predictability and independence from Labour that Autonomy brings. The efficiency and throughput that Humans bring.

01

Throughput

Safety of AMRs at 2X speed of end-to-end workflow completion.
Up to 100% redeployed labour hours per shift

02

Repeatable Reliability

Trust that your workflow will repeat again and again uninterrupted and without damage despite real world operational environments — the uneven floors, the wooden pallets, narrow passages. Shifts from indoor to outdoor.

Marked Asset Utilisation Improvement of up to 50% reduction in vehicle number depending on workflow type

03

Safety as a Guarantee

Count on operational safety that removes your operators from tough environments, removes collision risk caused by human factor and/or higher number of vehicles needed to achieve an equal throughput (AMRs). Minimised rack and pallet damage as a result.

Incident rate reduced by 90–100%

07 / 14

Why this works differently

Everyone else automates a task. Hive runs a model.

The leap from AGV to AMR took fifty years. The leap to VLA took two. One model learning from every shift, generalizing from pallet picking to truck loading to snow clearing. No new script per task.

01

AGV Automated Guided Vehicle 1960s →

Fixed paths on magnetic tape, wires or QR codes. One route, one job. Change the layout, re-lay the tape.

02

AMR Autonomous Mobile Robot 2010s →

SLAM maps and dynamic navigation. Better, but still one task-specific script per operation. New task, new engineering cycle.

03

VLA Vision · Language · Action 2024 →

One general model. Cameras in. Natural-language goals in. Actions out. Same model picks pallets, loads trucks, clears snow. Hive is one of very few running this in industrial production today.

100% VLA

Pallet pick · Hive forklift

Live footage· Toyota forklift in VLA mode approaching wooden pallet · Ops-center multi-camera view

Live operations

08 / 14

Proof from the field

Four live operations. Real customers. Real production.

Operational on Volvo wheel loaders and Toyota Counterbalanced forklifts today. Hive do the hard task in the sector — Loading, Unloading at Height made reliable. Indoor and Outdoor.

Feeding the world

Yara · Herøya

Supervised physical AI wheel loaders moving fertilizer inside one of Europe's largest ammonia facilities.Why: proven in extreme industrial environment for 18+ months.

Keeping passes open

Presis Veidrift · Vikafjellet

Remote snow clearing in avalanche zones under Norwegian Public Roads Administration contract.Why: operators removed from life-threatening hazard zones.

Indoor-Outdoor carry & stack

St Gobain · Warehouse to Yard

Supervised physical AI Counterbalanced carrying wooden pallets between Yard and Warehouse to stack 5 high.Why: continuous production without operator shift gaps.

Complex recycling infrastructure

Stena Recycling

Proofpoint for operating in a brownfield complex environment with storage at height as well as indoor/outdoor operation with narrow aisles.Why: multi-vendor interoperability in confined spaces.

Public endorsement

09 / 14

Public · on record

The Director of Norwegian Public Roads. Publicly calling this the future.

A national road director posting on her own feed, tagging the agency, with the video live. Statens Vegvesen now runs a signed contract with Hive on Rv. 13 Vikafjellet.

Selected by the Norwegian Ministry of Transport

Contract signed · Automatic Winter Maintenance · 2025

Across the value chain

10 / 14

The full intralogistics flow

From pallet jacks to terminal tractors. One physical AI platform.

Pallet jacks Counterbalance forklifts Reach stackers Wheel loaders Terminal tractors

The retrofit kit

11 / 14

Installed in days. Not months.

Hive retrofits your fleet. No rip-and-replace.

Sensors

Cameras and lidar.

Roof-mounted perception stack. Full 360° view. Calibrated on your site during install.

Compute

Control cabinet onboard.

Runs the physical AI stack locally. Connected to our ops center over redundant LTE/5G.

Safety

E-stops, sirens, geofence.

Emergency stop on machine, at remote station, on handheld. Zone-bounded operation from day one.

Platform

Platform agnostic

Counterbalance forklifts, reach stackers and terminal tractors rolling into the platform through 2026.

Retrofit Kit

Installed in days. Not months.

Cameras, lidar, and a control cabinet. Mounted on your existing Volvo L60 to L350 wheel loader. Connected to our operations center. The physical AI operates the machine while a trained supervisor oversees every action. Your operators move into higher value tasks. Your machine is ready without leaving your site.

Start here

First step

Your Floor & Yard. Thirty days. Start here.

01

Site call with Hive operations.

Sixty-minute walk-through of your floor, shift pattern and target machine class. No deck required.

02

Pilot framework.

See Hive proving your workflows in operation for 3 weeks on one machine. No strings attached.

03

Bridge Partnership term sheet.

Streamlined commercial framework to extend term and add machines under Hive operational model.

04

Scaled Robotic Partnership.

Extend the machine types operating under Hive to your full Logistics workforce.

Your Hive contact

Ronny Azimi Liverød

VP Heavy Machinery · Hive Autonomy

ronny.liverod@hiveautonomy.no +47 481 32 299 · Kristiansand

Pilots for autumn 2026 are booking now. A short site call holds your slot.

Towards your double-digit savings from the go

Next Step — Your Full Fleet

Omni channel Robotic Labour with Hive

01

Counterbalanced Forklift

Full autonomy on counterbalance fleets — loading, unloading, and trailer operations in real industrial yards.

02

Reach Truck

High-bay racking and narrow-aisle operations — autonomous put-away and retrieval at height.

03

Humanoid

Next-generation labour augmentation — designed for tasks requiring dexterity in unstructured environments.