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A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.
- Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Viewpoint: When Chinese robots replace service jobs
Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.
Imagine those robots were made in China, powered by the next generation of AI.
This is all quite plausible. According to the International Federation of Robotics, global sales of professional service robots reached almost 200,000 units in 2024. More than one-fifth of those units were deployed in hospitality and service roles, including front-desk assistants and food-and-beverage delivery. One cafe in Beijing is now fully staffed with autonomous robots, which can talk to customers, take orders, and deliver drinks entirely on their own. The future of AI is physical, as Ian Bremmer recently noted.
China is the epicenter, now producing the majority of all worldwide robots, while the US falls increasingly behind. One recent study projected the size of China’s service-robot industry to reach $7.2 billion by 2031, accelerated by generous government subsidies and a focused industrial policy. From a Chinese perspective this makes sense, especially in light of their looming demographic bubble. By 2050, the country will have 150 million fewer people; China is leaning into robots instead.
Keenon is a market leader. It’s worth browsing their catalogue: Kleenbot, a simple roomba-like cleaner; Butlerbot, an R2D2-esque droid for hotels; Dinnerbot, a more complex automated waiter; and XMAN, a fully scifi humanoid robot with a base like a Segway. Keenon ships to over 600 global cities with no signs of slowing down.
Many societies are not ready.
Swapping a human greeter for a robot in a hotel lobby is far more visible than swapping a human assembler in a distant factory for algorithm-driven automation. The robot is public. It is physical. And it is branded — and if the brand is foreign, the communal understanding will be simple: “their machine replaced our person.”
Robotics firms of all nationalities know this risk, and marketing materials often emphasise robots’ “assistant” roles. Yet the scale and global spread of robotic deployments will be unspinnable. Countries will face difficult questions: Do they allow foreign-made service robots for their efficiency gains? Or do they regulate and protect domestic labor, potentially excluding or throttling foreign or global robot makers?
Governments will also be confronted with a national security challenge. If your country has millions of foreign robots, each with cameras, microphones, and motors, what happens if you have friction with their maker? At minimum your robots would likely be used as widespread spies. Beyond that, foreign robotics firms could disrupt your economy by remotely disabling the robots — the manufacturer could perhaps blame vague “glitches.” In the worst-case scenario, robots could rise up as guerilla fighters against their putative owners.
In the end, China’s surge in retail and service-robot exports may be as geopolitically significant as its earlier dominance in consumer electronics. The difference now is public-facing: a robot in a restaurant or lobby is more visible than a smartphone in your pocket. And if that robot is Chinese-made, the message takes on geopolitical overtones. The next time you are served by a machine, you might also be served a symbol — of automation, of global labour shifts, and of the next global convulsion.