BlackBerry, the company most people still associate with the clicky-keyboard smartphones of the 2000s, says its future is increasingly about machines that move on their own.
According to CNBC, BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo said robotics is one of the fastest-growing businesses inside QNX, the company's embedded software unit, as BlackBerry pushes that software beyond the automotive market where it made its name.
A quick primer on why that matters. QNX is a real-time operating system — software that sits underneath the applications and guarantees that critical instructions execute on a predictable schedule. In a car, that is the difference between a braking command landing in milliseconds and landing whenever the system gets around to it. QNX has long been embedded in vehicles, running things like digital dashboards and driver-assistance systems, and it has quietly become one of BlackBerry's most durable assets after the handset business faded.
Robots need the same guarantees cars do. A machine navigating a warehouse floor or a factory line has to sense, decide, and actuate in tight, reliable time windows, with safety consequences when it doesn't. That technical overlap is the argument for QNX moving into robotics: it is less a new product than a new market for software already built for exactly this kind of work.
CNBC frames the shift in the context of physical AI — the industry term for artificial intelligence that acts on the physical world through robots and vehicles, rather than generating text or images on a screen.
The sources here report the growth claim but do not include figures breaking out how large the robotics business is or how fast it is expanding, so the scale behind "fastest-growing" remains unquantified.
Why it matters: if the AI boom really is moving from chatbots into physical machines, the unglamorous operating-system layer those machines run on becomes valuable ground — and BlackBerry is arguing it already owns some of it.