- A Chinese robotics company has said some workers ‘want to be replaced’ by its humanoid robots
- Agibot has launched its range of humanoid and quadrupedal robots in the UK B2B sector
- The company’s head in Europe and the US also said that robots could become nurses and teachers
An executive at Chinese robotics company Agibot has said the company believes its humanoid robots can replace certain human workers — and that “in some jobs, they want to be replaced.”
Founded in 2023 by two former Huawei engineers, Agibot makes humanoid robots, quadruped robots and cleaning robots for the business-to-business (B2B) sector, advertising uses such as manufacturing, cleaning, entertainment and construction.
The company recently rolled its 15,000. unit off the production line and announced its expansion into the UK market at an event in London on 30 June.
In a press conference at the event attended by TechRadar, the president of AgiBot Europe and America, William Shi, told reporters that “we have to take into account people who do dangerous, boring and repetitive jobs – these kinds of jobs can be replaced very easily.”
Shi added: “For some job descriptions, they want to be replaced because it’s very boring, very dangerous and very high risk – nobody wants to do this [kind of job]”.
‘Replaced by robotics’
Agibot’s product range includes the full-sized humanoid A3 robot, the half-sized X2 humanoid robot, and the D1 series of four-legged robots (with form factors similar to dogs, although the company never describes them as such).
Although the company has just landed in the UK, its robots have been successfully deployed in manufacturing facilities in China. A recent YouTube livestream shows the G2 industrial robot ‘at work’ at the Longcheer electronics factory, where the humanoid robots are deployed alongside human workers.
Speaking about Agibot’s implementation with Longcheer, Shi said, “They have a lot of workers standing 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 production stage.”
“This kind of step can easily—and is expected to—be replaced by robotics,” he continued, “because it doesn’t create value or create happiness for people. They don’t learn doing this job. They don’t invent things.”
At present, 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 — ie picking things up).
The company is actively aiming for autonomy, driven by usage data collection and further AI development, but Shi emphasizes that Agibot humanoids will remain “under human control and expectation.”
Robot child rearing
In addition to manufacturing, Shi singled out baristas, live entertainment workers and even teachers and nurses as professions that could be filled by robots: “There is a great shortage of nurses in every country, from China, to America, to Europe, and also a great shortage of teachers.”
“Most children’s questions can be answered [by robots] – phonics, science and maths questions, or even some general conversation. You ask about the weather, the humidity; you can ask these questions to all the bots because they are based on large language models.”
Still, there is some distance between using ChatGPT to conduct research and allowing a humanoid robot to teach children – and according to 2025 research from KPMG and the University of Melbourne, while nearly 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 number of business partners – including Nvidia, which supplies chipsets for the robots – backing the company’s UK launch, it clearly expects to make big strides in B2B industries first and foremost. But Agibot does not rule out a future where robots are part of our everyday lives.
“What we want in the future is that the robot can take some responsibility in daily life,” Shi said, “but they will never make the decisions instead of a human.”
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