AI robots are entering the public world—with mixed results

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Robots are stepping out. Once relegated to factories and warehouses, next-generation robots are popping up in public spaces—from retail stores to museums—cleaning, cooking and even conversing with humans.

Improvements in “brainpower," most notably the adoption of the technology behind ChatGPT, and a surge of investment are helping drive their public debut and 2025 could be a turning point in what robots can do. Operators say they expect to deploy more public-facing robots. The robotics and drone sector in 2024 had attracted about $12.8 billion in venture-capital dollars by mid-December, up from $11.6 billion in all of 2023, according to analytics firm PitchBook.

While operators are excited about new GenAI-powered capabilities, they are mindful that this next generation of robots won’t excel at every human interaction without some stumbles. Make that many stumbles. “Some things which are very easy for people are very hard for robots," said David Pinn, chief executive of Brain Corp, which provides software for automated floor-cleaning and inventory management robots used at retailers like Sam’s Club.

Even something as simple as picking up an arbitrary object and moving it “is a really hard problem in the world of robotics," he said. Traditionally, robots rely on code that tells them how to execute functions or react to specific scenarios. Variability of what they could do was more or less limited to the specific actions they were trained on.