Vention’s Demo Day 2026 Highlights Zero Shot Automation™ – Automating Automation
December 3, 2025
By Krystie Johnston
Vention has been democratizing automation since 2017, and their 6th annual Demo Day demonstrated another step on that journey. For those unfamiliar with Vention, they are headquartered in Quebec and describe themselves as the creator of the world’s only AI-powered full-stack software and hardware automation platform. For those who are familiar, become better acquainted with Vention’s next evolution of intelligent manufacturing: Zero-Shot Automation™.
Zero-Shot Automation™
Since their first Demo Day, Vention has introduced new pillars to support their hardware and software offering to make automation more accessible for everyone. Design, program, deploy, and operate, and now, artificial intelligence (AI) embedded across the entire platform culminate in Vention’s new Zero-Shot Automation™. From zero to automated in just a few clicks. “The platform is going to be so powerful. It is getting so easy to go from the idea of equipment to its deployment on the factory floor. We call it ‘Zero-Shot Automation™’,” says Etienne Lacroix, CEO and founder of Vention.
Lacroix says the term was inspired by zero-shot learning, where AI models are pre-trained, eliminating the need to accumulate data for weeks before the model can achieve its goals. “We extended the term to ‘Zero-Shot Automation™,’ which implies that it is simple, it is fast, it is going to work the first time. That is really the theme of the event this year,” he says. “I think it is going to feel powerful. I think for a user watching the event, it is going to feel like, ‘Wow! Now there is one place where I can really do all of this [design, program, simulate, and deploy] with AI.’ There is no equivalent on the market.”
Get it right the first time
The current reality is that automating is hard. It takes time, and it is difficult to get it right the first time. Zero-Shot Automation™ has been designed to make the first try, the only try needed. Now, software and hardware will work together, making it possible to design an automated system that will work as intended – faster than ever before. “Today, software is disjointed; there is mechanical software to design, software to program a robot, software to program a PLC, software for safety – and none of these systems talk to one another. You never end up with a digital twin that has all the moving parts – that is today’s world. And we are basically going to show the new way, where it is all integrated into the same workflow.”
With Vention’s platform, you do not start from scratch. You start with certainty. Lacroix says that with Demo Day 2026, they are releasing a new product called ‘Vention Project,’ which he describes as the biggest repository of machine specifications that exists on the market today. Users can go into Vention Project, select the type of equipment they want – something as basic as a simple workstation, or as complex as full end-of-line palletizing – and it will guide them in a structured way to define every requirement, so everything is provided at the end.
Design with AI
Lacroix explains that Vention Project ensures the certainty that is all too often lacking when designing and building automated systems. “In the world of system integration, there are always gray zones. What people want, and what they get, is always disconnected. That is because it is a messy process. People do not know what to define as their requirements – they have never done it before.” He says that Vention Project compiles more than 400,000 designs that have been done on the Vention platform – all that data – and created a tool that helps people scope what they want. The right way. The first time.
Demo Day 2026 highlights a newer user interface for their MachineBuilder, making it faster and more intuitive for users to select the right components from thousands of industrial LEGO parts to design and deploy custom automated systems. Lacroix is excited about how AI is taking Vention Project to the next level. “Now, when you design on Vention and you mouse over a certain part of your design, we look at the context – the mechanical context – and learn from all the designs that were done by our team or our clients, to understand how to solve that mechanical context. It is now simpler and faster to fulfill the mission of the machine.”
Program with AI
The jewel of Vention’s Demo Day 2026 is their Developer Toolkit, which opens Vention’s platform and completely changes the ecosystem. Francois Giguere, CTO at Vention, explains that they have designed the toolkit so that hardware and software are engineered as one. Now, the two main personas that create any automation – PLC programmers and AI developers – can find common ground. “We are giving a set of tools to our users so they can develop control software for machines with modern programming languages – which is rarely done the way we do it – but we really believe it is the future,” Giguere says.
To enable people to build control software faster and more efficiently, they need two things: standard tooling and hardware abstraction. Giguere says Vention’s Developer Toolkit has both. AI developers (who are not hardware experts) can build control software for machines by combining Vention’s plug-and-play hardware with their software libraries – and vice versa, hardware experts can use Vention’s AI enabled platform for easier programming.
“If I want an AI developer to build control software for machines – they are not hardware experts – so what we do is combine our plug-and-play hardware with our software libraries to create what I call an ‘API’ to the physical world,” he says. “You can say, with a single line of code, ‘Move robot here,’ and because you use Vention’s hardware, everything is plug-and-play and easy to set up. You can be a software developer and call an API to a robot – just like you call an API to a server or a website.”
Deploy with AI
Easy design and programming are just part of the story. Vention has also embedded AI into the deployment of robotics and automated systems. “Physical AI means a lot of different things for different people, but at Vention, what we are trying to do is to simplify the deployment of industrial machines to make it more affordable and easier to adopt from the manufacturers,” Giguere says. “And we saw a big opportunity with AI and physical AI, particularly because we see it can be a means to simplify how machines are deployed and programmed and built.”
With Physical AI, it is possible to manage uncertainty in a cell, making it faster and easier to deploy automation and robotics. For example, imagine the task was to have a robot pick an object, like a banana, and place it in a work cell. It is irrelevant how the robot picks or places the banana – it uses Physical AI to figure out how to put the banana in an exact spot. “The system will self-learn and will adapt to the environment and will pick any banana of any size and put it in the right place and will figure out how to do it,” Giguere says. “And we see a big opportunity here because that means you offload the work to AI, and you take less programming time.”
Main takeaways
Giguere concludes by saying that with the releases from Demo Day 2025, Vention’s platform is more flexible, so it takes less time to configure on site, less time to deploy, and they can bring these types of solutions to their customers at a lower cost, faster. And Lacroix summarizes by saying they have embedded AI throughout the workflow, opened the platform up to developers, and have given their users powerful tools so they can do great things in a fully abstracted way. With Zero-Shot Automation™ they have built a platform so powerful, that automation itself can be automated.
More Information
Interested in learning more: Watch Demo Day 2025 or visit Vention today!
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Vention Advances Intelligent Manufacturing with Major AI and Developer Platform Expansions at 6th Annual Demo Day
Vention, creator of what they say is the world’s only AI-powered full-stack software and hardware automation platform, has announced the next evolution of intelligent manufacturing driving its Zero-Shot Automation™ vision. At its 6th annual Demo Day, Vention announced new capabilities that allow companies to automate without the need for traditional hardware integration or complex programming. The innovations include new tools that further expand the platform to a global community of developers and roboticists, as well as advanced simulation and AI features designed to help manufacturers move from design to deployed automation faster than ever before.
