Biography
Jürgen Brunner is Austrian and has been working across borders for 26 years, through Europe, the Middle East, Australia, the US and finally China. The China part started as a five-day assignment. Sixteen years later he is still there, now CEO APAC for AGILOX, which builds autonomous mobile robots for logistics and started life as a garage startup.
He is refreshingly unromantic about how careers like his actually happen. The big move was not a master plan, it was a short trip that kept getting extended until it became a life. He puts a lot of weight on patience and on hands-on experience over paper credentials, probably because that is how his own path worked.
Running an APAC business from inside China also means he competes directly with Chinese manufacturers who keep getting better, so he does not have the luxury of pretending the gap is not closing.
Areas of expertise
- Autonomous mobile robots
- Intralogistics & automation
- APAC business leadership
- Localization in China
- Scaling a startup
- Manufacturing competitiveness
What the conversation covered
We talked about Chinese manufacturing catching up faster than European companies want to admit, and why he thinks Europe is simply too slow to react. He walked me through what localization really takes when you are selling robots into a Chinese plant, and told the AGILOX story back when it was a garage startup rather than the company it is now.
He is also honest about hiring and growth, why he trusts experience over a university degree, and how much of this comes down to patience, staying long enough for a short assignment to turn into something real.