Catie Cuan Keynote Speaker

Founder & CEO Zenie AI
Robot Choreographer
Stanford Robotics/AI PhD

Catie Cuan's Biography

An entrepreneur, engineer, and artist, Dr. Catie Cuan is a pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics’ and works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art. She is the founder and CEO of Zenie, a consumer AI company, backed by Gradient Ventures and HF0. Catie holds a PhD and Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a Postdoc leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center.

The title of her PhD thesis is “Compelling Robot Behaviors through Supervised Learning and Choreorobotics”, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University. During her PhD, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google (now a part of Google Deepmind). She has held artistic residencies at the Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, the RAD Lab, and ThoughtWorks Arts. Catie is a prolific and award-winning robot choreographer, having created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Catie is also an International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures and the former co-founder of caali, an embodied media company.

Choreorobotics: Why We Need to Teach Billions of Robots how to Dance

Our Human-Friendly Future with Robots: From Work to Home

Physical AI: Building Robots is Giving AI a Body

She pioneers choreorobotics at the intersection of AI, human-robot interaction and art, giving audiences a rare lens on how machines can move, communicate and earn human trust.
She brings Stanford robotics and AI research leadership into the room, translating cutting-edge supervised learning and robot behaviour design into clear implications for product teams and innovators.
She has led breakthrough applied machine learning work inside Google X’s Everyday Robots and Google Robotics, grounding her insights in real-world deployment challenges, not just theory.
She is a founder and CEO building consumer AI, equipping entrepreneurs and executives with practical perspective on turning frontier research into scalable products and responsible innovation.
She creates award-winning performances with robots across major cultural institutions and residencies, showing organisations how to use creativity and embodiment to make emerging technology tangible, memorable and human-centred.