Imagine ordering dinner and watching a humanoid robot walk toward your table with a tray in its hands. A few years ago, that would have looked like science fiction. Today, robots are moving into restaurants, factories, warehouses and other real world environments.
The technology is still developing, but robots are becoming better at moving, seeing, handling objects and carrying out physical tasks alongside people.
That raises a bigger question than whether a robot can serve a meal. Over the next five to ten years, how much of the work currently done by people could be handed to machines?
Robots Are Already Moving Into Real Workplaces
Humanoid robots are no longer limited to laboratory demonstrations. Agility Robotics says its Digit humanoid has accumulated more than 65,000 hours of commercial operation across customer facilities, including work involving manufacturing, warehousing and logistics.
Recent developments are also pushing robots into more complicated environments. Chinese robotics startup Spirit AI says its humanoids are already working on production lines at CATL and JD.com, while the company is targeting major advances in embodied AI by 2027.
Robots are also being developed for very different kinds of work. Some are built for factories, others for transport, healthcare, agriculture or homes. Seeing these categories side by side helps show why automation will affect different workplaces in different ways.
Our earlier report on robot racers showed how quickly humanoid movement is advancing.
The First Jobs to Feel the Change
The easiest work to automate is usually predictable, repetitive and structured.
That makes warehouses, manufacturing lines, material handling and some service tasks natural starting points. A robot does not need to understand the entire world if it only needs to repeatedly move containers from one location to another.
Restaurants are more difficult. A human waiter may need to carry food, understand a customer’s request, avoid people, respond to unexpected situations and deal with problems when something goes wrong.
Humanoid robots will need much greater reliability before they can handle that full range of responsibilities without supervision.
What Could Change by 2030?
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 58% of surveyed employers expect robotics and autonomous systems to transform their businesses by 2030. The report also projects 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced across broader labour market trends, not by robots alone.
One useful way to look at this change is through tasks rather than entire jobs.
Employers surveyed by the WEF expect the proportion of work tasks performed mainly by humans alone to fall substantially by 2030, while technology and human machine collaboration take a larger share.
That means the first major change may happen inside existing jobs. A warehouse worker could spend less time moving goods. A factory worker could supervise more automated equipment. A restaurant employee could handle customers while robots take over repetitive physical work.
What Changes by 2036?
The ten year horizon is much harder to predict.
If robots become cheaper, safer, more dexterous and better at dealing with unpredictable environments, their role could expand beyond factories and warehouses.
They could potentially take on more cleaning, delivery, food service, maintenance and other physical tasks. Reaching that point will depend on reliability, safety, energy use, cost and the ability to operate around people.
Today’s demonstrations cannot tell us exactly where those developments will lead.
The Workplace May Change Before Jobs Disappear
Robots do not necessarily have to replace an entire job to change it.
A job is usually a collection of tasks. If machines become capable of taking over some of those tasks, the job itself can change without disappearing completely.
That could create workplaces where humans and robots divide responsibilities according to their strengths. Machines could handle repetitive or physically demanding work, while people focus more on judgement, communication, problem solving and situations that require flexibility.
The next five years should show how far today’s industrial deployments can scale. The following five may determine whether humanoid robots remain specialised workplace tools or become genuinely general purpose machines.
For now, the question is no longer whether robots will enter the workplace. The real story is how much of the work will change once they do.
