Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

This robot store employs robots to sell robots

robot
Jeff/Flickr

They say the medium is the message. Well, in one Silicon Valley store, the salesperson is the product.

Advertisement

Gliding around the Beam store in downtown Palo Alto are a handful of simply designed white floor robots. They look like handtrucks with a flat-screen TV bolted on top. 

But these robots aren't just nicely designed pieces of technology; they're the entire sales staff.

Beam-branded floor robots, which are used for business conferencing, telemedicine, and apparently retail sales, are the latest venture of California tech company Suitable Technologies.

Each day, the (human) employees of Beam telecommute to their respective robots, their welcoming faces displaying on one of the robots' screen.

Advertisement

Entirely remotely, the staff opens the brick-and-mortar store, adjusts the lighting and temperature, and guides the robots to welcome customers as they amble past and, inevitably, stop.

"The live environment is really effective," Erin Rapacki, Beam’s director of marketing, recently told The Atlantic. 

beam robot
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Images

In that sense, perhaps the real genius of Beam's sales approach lies somewhat deeper than a gimmicky retail store.

People often criticize the long-distance, work-from-home model because it can't offer the same warm feeling of real connection. Bosses like their employees to come into the office to get the collaborative juices flowing. Phoning it in just doesn't cut it.

Advertisement

But if a business owner comes into Beam's store and buys into the idea enough to actually spend money on a few of the machines, he or she is implicitly agreeing the robot can preserve those warm feelings.

If a virtual face can sell itself, surely another employee can work effectively from a remote location.

That approach is all-or-nothing, however. Either people think it's crazy or they think it's crazy brilliant.

The same goes for other cases where robots are replacing humans. Consider Japan's new robot hotel, built next to an amusement park and staffed almost entirely by animatronic humanoids (and one dinosaur). Or there's Pepper, a robot with emotional intelligence that can soothe people when they're sad.

Advertisement

For now, Beam is looking pretty clever. The device is rigged to give customers a tour of the digs, clean the store, and it even comes with "party mode" to accommodate noisier environments. It also comes with a park assist function to charge up once it's exhausted the two hours of call time.

Best of all, it has a built-in Skittles dispenser. Which, at $1,995 per Beam, should probably go without saying.

Silicon Valley Business Technology
Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account