AgiBot Releases Worken, First Work-Hour KPI for Robots

At the 2026 AIGBOT Innovation Day held on October 29 at the Shanghai Expo Center, AgiBot co-founder, president and CTO Peng Zhihui raised a central question for embodied AI: how should robot performance be judged, and what metric can capture machine value in the physical AI era?

Peng argued that every industrial era develops its own yardstick. The steam age, for example, used horsepower to quantify machine power. AgiBot is now applying that logic to robots with Worken, billed as the first work-hour KPI for robots.

The release points to a broader shift in robotics: as embodied systems move from demonstrations to real deployments, buyers and operators need comparable measures of output, reliability and labor contribution. Worken is intended to provide such a framework, turning robot work into a trackable productivity metric.

The company has not disclosed detailed evaluation methods or deployment data, but the proposal signals growing attention to standardized benchmarks for robot labor as physical AI commercialization accelerates.