- A Chinese robotics company said some of its employees “want to be replaced” by its humanoid robots.
- Agibot has launched its range of humanoid and quadruped robots to the UK B2B sector
- The company’s head for Europe and the United States also said that robots could become nurses and teachers.
An executive at Chinese robotics company Agibot said the company believes its humanoid robots could replace some human workers — and that “in some jobs, they want to be replaced.”
Agibot, founded in 2023 by two former Huawei engineers, makes humanoid, quadrupedal and cleaning robots for the business-to-business (B2B) sector, advertising use cases such as manufacturing, cleaning, entertainment and construction.
The company recently rolled its 15,000th unit off the production line and announced its expansion into the UK market at an event in London on June 30.
At a press conference at the event, attended by TechRadar, AgiBot Europe and America president William Shi told reporters that “we need to take into account people doing dangerous, boring, repeatable tasks – this type of work can be very easily replaced.”
Shi added: “For some job descriptions, they want to be replaced, because it’s very boring, very dangerous and very risky – no one wants to do that. [kind of job]”.
“Replaced by robotics”
Agibot’s product line includes the full-size A3 humanoid robot, the half-size X2 humanoid robot, and the D1 line of quadruped robots (with dog-like form factors, although the company never describes them as such).
Although the company has only just landed in the UK, its robots have been successfully deployed in manufacturing plants in China. A recent YouTube livestream shows the G2 industrial robot “at work” at the Longcheer electronics factory, where humanoid robots are deployed alongside human employees.
Speaking about Agibot’s deployment with Longcheer, Shi said: “They have a lot of workers on their feet for eight hours a day. They take a smartphone, turn it around and put it in a box. And then they take the box and move on to the next phase of production.”
“These kinds of steps can easily be – and should be – replaced by robotics,” he continued, “because it doesn’t create value or happiness for people. They don’t learn by doing this work. They don’t invent anything.”
Currently, Agibot’s products are not autonomous, but each is equipped with a three-part AI model, with each part controlling interaction (with people), locomotion (moving around), and manipulation (of the local environment, i.e. picking up objects), respectively.
The company is actively aiming for autonomy, fueled by usage data collection and further AI development, but Shi emphasizes that Agibot humanoids will remain “under human control and expectations.”
Robots educating children
Besides manufacturing, Shi pointed out that baristas, entertainment workers, and even teachers and nurses are professions that could be filled by robots: “There is a big shortage of nurses in every country, from China to the United States to Europe, and also a big lack of teachers. »
“Most of the children’s questions can be answered [by robots] – questions about phonetics, science and mathematics, or even everyday conversations. You ask about the weather, the humidity; you can ask these questions to all bots, because they are based on large language models.
Yet there’s some distance between using ChatGPT to conduct research and allowing a humanoid robot to teach children – and according to a 2025 study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne, while almost three-quarters of UK adults use AI at work, less than half say they trust it.
With the B2C market a distant target for Agibot and a raft of business partners – including Nvidia, which supplies chipsets for robots – supporting the company’s UK launch, it’s clear that it expects to make big strides in the B2B sectors above all. But Agibot does not rule out a future in which robots will be part of our daily lives.
“What we want in the future is that robots can take some responsibility in daily life,” Shi said, “but they will never make decisions instead of a human.”
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