Are Robots Replacing Humans? Let Us Find Out
In hospitals across the United States, patients and staff frequently encounter a friendly, four-foot-tall white robot named Moxi going about its business. Developed by Diligent Robotics, this wheeled machine shuttles vital medical supplies around hallways, often responding to nurses’ greetings with heart-shaped LED eyes and cheerful beeps. Currently, Diligent Robotics operates about one hundred of these machines, but hospitals do not buy them outright. Instead, they utilize a model called robotics-as-a-service, renting the machines through a subscription that bundles maintenance, upgrades, and remote human engineering support into one flat fee.
Chief Operating Officer Todd Brugger explains that this subscription model lowers upfront expenses for hospitals while allowing them to access rapidly evolving software. This rental trend is expanding everywhere, covering robot bartenders, autonomous farm weeders, and early humanoid models. Because humanoids remain a work in progress, companies mostly rent them for specific entertainment tasks, like singing or dancing at corporate weddings. Counterpoint Research analyst Ethan Qi notes that engineers train these robots using videos of real dancers, though human technicians still accompany the machines to handle unpredictable environments.
The ambition for humanoid rentals extends far beyond entertainment into domestic help. California-based company 1X plans to ship its home helper robot, NEO, offering a monthly subscription option of 499 dollars alongside a 20,000-dollar purchase price to make the technology affordable for more people. Renting protects consumers from rapid obsolescence, allowing them to swap hardware for newer models each year without needing deep coding expertise.
Demand spans industrial sectors as well. Formic manages a fleet of over 250 industrial robots on a subscription basis, covering all repair costs to help smaller factories automate affordably. Meanwhile, analyst Marco Wang notes that some clients now link rental fees directly to the amount of human labor a robot saves. For manufacturers, these leases provide vital real-world training data. Chinese firms like Agibot now rent humanoids across seventeen countries, utilizing hotels and cleaning apps as testing grounds. While government subsidies in China may encourage state-owned firms to buy humanoids outright, the convenience of renting continues to alter how businesses manage their workforce.
