There are two types of robots today:

• Dazzling prototypes that dominate headlines and light up social feeds but would never survive an eight‑hour shift doing meaningful work (yes, that includes @MechKenna)
• Industrial workhorses that quietly shuttle pallets inside warehouses or perform specific tasks on production lines

Both face critical distribution challenges: the former because they’re simply not useful enough for the mass market to begin with, and the latter because industrial clients tend to purchase in small quantities, often just dozens of units per site. Furthermore, they’re spread across wide geographies, making logistics, servicing, and scaling tremendously difficult. Aftermarket support becomes costly and slow, and fleet growth is limited by the complexity of each individual deployment.

Retail is the logistics backbone every industry wishes it had

At Auki, we’ve already been using retail to showcase the value of decentralized spatial computing, and we’ve realized that it can also be the ideal robot distribution network. Large retail chains already possess the operational infrastructure to support robotic fleets at scale and we’re going to use that our advantage.

Take one of our clients in the Nordics as an example: a chain with over 1,300 locations, serviced by just three regional warehouses. Each store receives daily deliveries from these hubs, and the trucks return on a predictable schedule.

This gives us a few unique advantages:

• We can deliver thousands of robots to just a few centralized locations
• The retailer’s existing logistics network handles the last-mile delivery to individual stores
• If a robot malfunctions, it can be picked up and returned via the same network on the same day—no custom reverse logistics needed

To further streamline support, we’re proposing containerized service bays at each warehouse: identical physical environments that simplify technician training and standardize repairs. With spare units stored at the warehouse, replacement robots can be dispatched and deployed within 24 hours, minimizing downtime.

This model will allow us to lease and support large scale fleets with:

• Better unit economics
• Faster deployment
• Vastly superior service reliability

In short, by aligning with the realities of retail logistics, we unlock a distribution and support model that scales, not to dozens of robots per customer, but to thousands. And unlike many industrial robots that are designed for highly specific environments, our retail robots will be well suited for all the retail stores in the world that have aisles with products on shelves.

Taking on the opportunity in partnership with industry leaders

The logistics-integrated nature of our solution means we have a realistic path to scaling into 100k locations in the next three years with our partners:

• PadBot: one of the most widely deployed robot companies in the world, with factory lines capable of producing thousands of units per month.
• Alset Robot: they are PadBot’s international distributor and service partner who have several offices around APAC and North America, including most recently Hong Kong, right in Auki HQ space on the 10th floor of CTF Life Tower.

We’ve already integrated PadBots into Auki domains and shown them off in retail demos at AWE and SuperAI. Now that Alset Robot have moved in with us, we’re ready to put our heterodox robot distribution plan into action.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: away for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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