GenAI Robots in Services

The biggest challenge with service robots was never the technology. It was always the experience design.

For years, companies deployed robots that could deliver a tray or scan a barcode- and then wondered why adoption stalled. The answer wasn't mechanical failure. It was a service design failure: scripted bots forced customers into rigid, unnatural interactions, and the friction outweighed the convenience.

Jochen Wirtz's latest article in Harvard Business Review argues that generative AI is changing this equation. By integrating LLMs and agentic AI, robots can now hold natural conversations, reason through ambiguity, learn from a few demonstrations, and adapt in real time. The early evidence is striking -Waymo has completed over 20 million driverless trips, and BMW's humanoid robot contributed to roughly 30,000 vehicle assemblies in under a year.

But here's what I find most interesting from a services marketing perspective. Even with these capabilities, customer acceptance remains the make-or-break factor. Wirtz himself notes that most resistance starts at the customer touchpoint, not with the hardware. Tokyo's Henn na Hotel deployed robot receptionists that struggled with accents and unexpected requests- sometimes increasing staff workload rather than reducing it.

This is exactly the gap I've been researching- how consumers build (or withhold) trust in technology-mediated service encounters. Whether it's robotic solutions in hospitals, AI-driven healthcare delivery, or immersive retail technology, the pattern is consistent: adoption is not a technology deployment problem. It's a trust architecture problem.

Three things determine whether customers accept or resist an AI-mediated service encounter: perceived transparency (do I understand what this system is doing and why?), emotional readiness (am I comfortable with a non-human in this context?), and the quality of the human-AI handoff (can I reach a person when I need one?). Get these right, and the technology almost becomes invisible. Get them wrong, and no amount of engineering sophistication will drive adoption.

The organisations that succeed with service robots will be those that treat deployment as a service strategy question- not a technology procurement decision.

Source: Wirtz, J. (2026). How Gen AI Robots Are Reshaping Services. Harvard Business Review, May–June 2026.