Meet your new corporate colleague: A ‘brainless’ robot

NEW YORK: The new workers zipped around the office completing mundane tasks like fetching coffee, delivering meals and handing off packages. They did not get in anyone’s way or violate personal space. They waited unobtrusively for elevators with unfailing politeness. And, perhaps most enticingly, they did not complain.

That’s because they were robots.

Naver — a soup-to-nuts internet conglomerate in South Korea — has been experimenting with integrating robots into office life for several months. Inside a futuristic, starkly industrial, 36-story high-rise on the outskirts of Seoul, a fleet of about 100 robots cruise around on their own, moving from floor to floor on robot-only elevators and sometimes next to humans, rolling through security gates and entering meeting rooms.

Naver’s network of web services, including a search engine, maps, email and news aggregation, is dominant in South Korea, but its reach abroad is limited, lacking the global renown of a company like Google.

The company has been on the hunt for new avenues for growth. In October, it agreed to acquire Poshmark, an online secondhand retailer, for $1.2 billion. Now, Naver sees the software that powers robots in corporate office spaces as a product that other companies may eventually want.

Robots have found a home in other workplaces, such as factories and in retail and hospitality, but they are largely absent from the white-collar world of cubicles and conference rooms. There are thorny privacy questions: A machine teeming with cameras and sensors roaming company hallways could be a dystopian tool of corporate surveillance if abused, experts say.

Designing a space where machines can move freely without disturbing employees also presents a complicated challenge. But Naver has done extensive research to make sure that its robots — which resemble a rolling garbage can — look, move and behave in a way that makes employees comfortable. And as it develops its own robot privacy rules, it hopes to write the blueprint for the office robots of the future.

“Our effort now is to minimize the discomfort they cause to humans,” said Kang Sang-chul, an executive at Naver Labs, a subsidiary developing the robots.

Technology firms often encourage employees to test out their own products, but with its robots, Naver has turned its entire office into a research and development lab, deploying its employees as test subjects for future workplace technologies.

When Naver employees drive to the office, which finished construction this year, the company automatically sends them reminders of where they parked on the workplace app. Employees walk through security gates that use facial recognition, even while masked to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

At Naver’s in-house health clinic, artificial intelligence software suggests areas of focus for employees’ annual health exam. And then there are the robots.

Naver designed the office from the ground up with the robots in mind, starting construction in 2016. Every door is programmed to open when a robot approaches.

There are no tight hallways or obstructions on the floor. The ceilings are marked with numbers and QR codes to help the robots orient themselves. The cafeteria has lanes dedicated for robots to deliver meals.

After a series of experiments, for example, Naver concluded that the optimal spot for a robot in a crowded elevator with humans was the corner next to the entrance on the side opposite of the elevator buttons.

The writers are journalists with NYT©2022

The New York Times