[cdcox]

The B2C case here seems off to me. The market of people who are going to pay the high price tag, have enough storage, and tolerate the extreme limitations and slowness of these machines seems to be: the rich, the elderly, and people with physical disabilities. The latter two categories come with a huge number of liability and regulatory costs that I think most of these companies are not willing to handle. That does not feel like a huge market.

I'll have a stronger belief in these things for consumers when we start seeing B2B adoption. Hotels have routine, highly structured cleaning tasks; hospitals have a need for extra strength, have highly structured cleaning tasks, and need to stock items; grocery stores have highly structured cleaning tasks and need to stock. Hospitals at least could tolerate the slowness of these things.

Without any B2B adoption it's hard to not see this as Roombas all over again. Cool for people who like it but low impact and still a toy 20 years later. I think generative AI makes these things better, though still perhaps struggles with long task adoption, but if you look at their movement they are still slow, weak, cognitively inflexible, and unstable. Maybe this tech is accelerating in some way I don't see and I'd love to be proven wrong here.