Robots for Rent, Not Sale: QingTianZu Turns 'Work' into a Priced Commodity
For the past three years, the robot industry's dominant narrative has been selling hardware. Whoever has more joints, higher computing power, or greater degrees of freedom stands center stage. But at the September 16 ecosystem partner conference in Shanghai, QingTianZu CEO Li Yiyan poured cold water on this logic.
A robot's model is no longer the key to commercial success. What truly determines value is the work it can perform, how much work it completes, and the commercial return it generates.
The conference had no parameter walls or looping demos. Instead, robots were thrown into real commercial scenarios at Longfeng PRSCO. Two Lingxi X2 robots served as one-day store managers at Lindt's first store in China, handling greeting, explanation, recommendation, and gift distribution. Consumers took receipts to the Xingxiang retail kiosk, where dexterous hands grabbed merchandise, proving the chain from guide to experience to promotion on the spot.
In the second-floor cultural creative pop-up store, the same Lingxi X2 transformed into Xingzai, delivering explanations, pop-up Q&A, and photo guidance for the Shanghai Museum's Americas ancient civilization exhibition, and also spun off K12 educational content. On the fifth-floor rooftop garden, five deployed RaaS products were showcased, totaling seven Star series service matrices, all supporting long-term deployment.
These numbers are noteworthy: seven products, five scenarios, all long-term deployable. Most robot companies' commercialization remains at one-off pop-ups or exhibition performances, while QingTianZu has already precipitated non-standard demands into standard products. The Xingbo assistant serves as a physical live stream host, the Xingdong boxing match lets players remotely control A3 for combat, the Xingyue group uses four Lingbao robots to collaboratively play real instruments, and the Xingjian security plan uses Kutu D1 for nighttime patrol and anomaly alerts. Each is not a debut of a new concept but a mature service that has already run through real business scenarios.
Li Yiyan's Worken concept essentially prices robot productivity. Worken equals work plus token, defining a job as a describable, measurable, deliverable, and replicable standard unit. The radical aspect of this logic is that it turns robots from assets into services, from ownership into invocation. Enterprises no longer need to ask which robot to buy; they only need to say what work needs to be done. QingTianZu matches the optimal combination and completes the delivery loop.
The next stage of competition in the robot industry is not about hardware specs but scheduling capability. Whoever can integrate robots of different brands and forms into standardized services will hold pricing power. QingTianZu announced at the event a joint venture with Blue Universe, a subsidiary of BlueFocus, to expand explanation, interaction, and performance applications for scenic spots and museums, promoting embodied AI from one-off displays to daily operations in cultural tourism. The intention is clear: push RaaS from platform connection to industry collaboration and scale replication.
The history of information technology repeatedly proves that every computing paradigm shift is accompanied by a change in the unit of value measurement. Mainframe era sold by unit, PC era by configuration, cloud computing era by computing usage. The robot industry is undergoing the same transition. What QingTianZu seeks to build is a computing network in the robot field: robots are distributed nodes, and Worken is the circulating value.
When more and more robots truly enter jobs, the industry's value will no longer be defined by how many devices are stacked in warehouses. But questions arise: Can Worken become an industry-recognized measurement standard, or is it just QingTianZu's internal language? Does the barrier to scheduling capability come from ecosystem scale or from the speed of accumulating scenario data? Neither has an answer yet.