Artificial intelligence, robotics leaving lab for physical world

My most unforgettable moment at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference was not on a glamorous stage, but at Leju Robotics' booth. There was no static display — instead, a 1:1 factory production line had several humanoid robots destacking cartons, moving plastic bins and feeding small parts into machines, with a digital timer clocking their "work hours".

I watched as they autonomously corrected tilted boxes and misaligned grips — no staff intervened. The numbers told the real story: carton-destacking achieved 95.8 percent success over eight continuous hours at a warehouse, with a 28-second cycle time; plastic-bin handling hit 92 percent at the factories of Chinese car companies FAW and JAC; small-part feeding reached 94.3 percent across a dozen component types.

These were not choreographed dance moves. They were messy, repetitive industrial tasks — the kind that require precision and endurance. That, I realized, was WAIC's real narrative: AI and robotics are leaving the lab and entering the grit of the physical world. The shift from "robots that dance" to "robots that work" signals that the industry now obsesses over reliability, stamina and real-world problem-solving. Those percentage points are more compelling than any flashy demo.

Later, I interviewed Kevin Kelly, the legendary US futurist and co-founder of US magazine Wired. "The future is already here," he told me. But his evidence was not any particular demo at the booth — it was the everyday integration of AI into ordinary lives.

"That's a much stronger signal for me than any demo," he said. "I wouldn't have believed that even a year ago." What matters, he insisted, is cultural absorption — when people stop marveling and start taking AI for granted, the future has truly arrived.

Kelly's observation resonated with what I saw at Leju. The robots were doing unglamorous routine labor — precisely the kind that, once automated, quietly reshapes industries. Their consistency bordered on boring, and that boredom is the highest compliment you can pay a new technology: when it becomes unremarkable, it has truly arrived.

Kelly also visited a Shanghai AI incubator housing 300 large-model startups, which he called "very cool". He highlighted token costs as a potential game-changer — if China's open-source models deliver tokens at a fraction of Western prices, the landscape could tilt, though he remained cautious: "We don't know yet."

He emphasised that technology is additive: screens did not kill paper, and conversational interfaces will not kill touch-screens. New modes layer onto old ones, and the true "wow moment" — full 3D spatial intelligence — is still ahead.

That layered perspective echoes what I saw at Honor's booth, where the Robot Phone moves AI from a digital screen into the physical realm. Honor CEO Li Jian framed it as the beginning of a "companion-type lifeform" and likened China's advantage to fertile farmland: rich application scenarios as soil, end-to-end engineering as water, and an open collaborative ecosystem as sunlight.

In Silicon Valley, innovation often stays at the model layer; in China, the entire chain — from chips to devices to services — mobilizes to embed intelligence into tangible products, Li said.

That is precisely what I witnessed at Leju: software, hardware and industrial know-how seamlessly integrated to solve concrete problems.

Walking out, I recalled those robots quietly stacking boxes while a timer ticked on. No one watched them with wonder anymore; they had become industrial scenery. And that, I think, is the truest sign that the future has arrived — not when robots dance, but when they work, silently and reliably, beside us. Kevin Kelly was right: the future is already here. And from what I saw in Shanghai, it is not waiting for permission — it is busy getting to work, one carton at a time.