Robots Serve The Platter In China

The future of restaurant services has been revolutionised by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. This step was to modernise the service and retail industry in China by incorporating artificial intelligence and robotics.

Imagine yourself sitting in a nice restaurant and a little robotic waiter rolls up to your table and raises its lid and says "Enjoy your meal". Alibaba, the mandarin tech mogul which is well-known for integrating robotics and artificial intelligence into commerce, introduced this futuristic concept in its latest initiative "ROBOT.HE" restaurant in Shanghai.

The curious implementation is expected to bring reduction in costs up to a million yuan per year, living up to its objectives of higher efficiency and lower labour costs.

At the moment, the diners are coupled with Alibaba's Hema markets. Hema is the semi-automated chain of supermarkets where shoppers shop using the mobile app and get the order delivered to them at the checkout via conveyors or to their homes in a beeline. Currently, Alibaba owns 57 Hema markets in 13 cities including Beijing and Shanghai, all of which will showcase the robotic diners in due course.

According to industry experts, the implementation of robots is supposed to be an exhibition of Alibaba's tech prowess rather than critical business model to cut down the labour costs in a country with relatively low labour costs. And, the robotic waiters resonate with swift technology adoptions in the country where the government uses facial recognition to identify serial law-breakers. In China, incorporating robotics into commerce and retail is becoming the new stream of fashion.

JD.com, Alibaba's e-commerce rival has already notified about its proposal to open 1000 automated restaurants by 2020 in which the food will be prepared and served by robots, in addition to incorporating airborne drones into its delivery system.

The latest innovations in automated machine technologies are greeted at the right time as the growth rate in the Chinese e-commerce boom begins to plateau, and the focus shifting from rapid expansions to improved operations. Hence, the technologies play a prominent role in cutting costs and providing better services.

The bookings for a table can be made via mobile applications which makes it easy for customers to draw from long waiting lines. This helps to improve customer service and satisfaction.

The restaurant automation helps to dip the cost down. Say, for example initially for 2-3 people a meal cost about 300-400 yuan but with the magic hand of robots, it got scaled down to 100 yuan.

Chinese artificial intelligence advocates predict that robots someday will sweep the mundane duties as the standard of living rises specifically in China where labour force drastically reduced due to one child population control policy.

Albeit, having a lot of advantages with the use of robots, the cost of robots still remain on the higher side and many companies are trying to be on the government's high tech- portfolio. Being on the high-tech portfolio enables the companies to build the tech prowess to drive up the margin on sales.