Robot.com’s CEO: automate the boring work

Robot.com CEO – Felipe Chavez, co-founder and CEO of Robot.com, argues that robots should first take on repetitive physical tasks that drive turnover—an approach he says he learned while working delivery jobs himself. The company says it has deployed more than 500 robots and

In a quiet moment at Robot.com’s headquarters in San Francisco on Thursday, CEO and co-founder Felipe Chavez pulled out his laptop and played a Chobani commercial—an almost comically gentle vision of robotics.

The ad. with the light. whimsical tone of a Studio Ghibli movie. showed children frolicking and animals coexisting with robots in an organic landscape. Chavez watched it like it was a blueprint: a world where the physical work is handled by machines. and people get to pursue the parts of life they actually care about.

“The mission that we have as a company is to bring automation to the physical world, to free human beings from labor that they don’t want to do and that they can now actually pursue their meaningful life,” Chavez said.

Robot.com’s pitch—at least in the way Chavez describes it—turns on one stubborn business reality: boring. repetitive physical labor is often the kind of job that leads to high turnover. So the company’s automation plan doesn’t start with replacing human life. It starts with removing the tasks that make people want to leave.

Chavez said the idea crystallized while delivering for his first startup. Before launching Kiwibot in 2017—a campus robot delivery outfit that later became Robot.com—Chavez ran a grocery-delivery company similar to Instacart in his home country of Columbia. That startup, Chavez said, was completely bootstrapped, and sometimes he completed deliveries himself.

“In that company, I realized that the manual work could be very exhausting and it could be very boring,” he said.

Today, Robot.com says it has more than 500 working robots deployed and has completed more than 2.5 million tasks. Around 400 of those robots are still delivery robots. Chavez said. but the company is expanding into warehouses. food service. and advertising. In those areas, robots are expected to act like roving billboards.

What the company is building is also deliberately narrow. Chavez said Robot.com isn’t pitching a general-purpose humanoid robot that can do everything. Instead, he imagines an entire ecosystem of robots—each in a different form factor—responsible for small, specific tasks.

He described one scenario from Robot.com’s food-delivery business. As the delivery operation grew. restaurant workers found themselves taking on a new chore: walking outside to place to-go containers inside the robots. Chavez said this created friction in the workflow, forcing customers to retrain workers or even hire extra people.

In other words, automating one task didn’t remove friction; it moved it. The company had to start thinking about a “manipulation solution,” or a robot that can grab and handle items.

From there, Chavez said Robot.com analyzes labor by breaking it down into specific tasks to identify which areas can be handled by robots. He laid out the company’s guiding rule of thumb for what’s next.

“If you can do it with two fingers, very likely we will be able to do it,” Chavez said.

That “two fingers” framing puts Robot.com at odds with much of the humanoid hype swirling through Silicon Valley. Companies like Figure AI and Tesla are building bipedal robots with five fingers—an approach that. Chavez acknowledged. means they first have to solve the herculean problem of full dexterity and manipulation. If they can solve that and crack manufacturing challenges. those companies have said the robots will work in warehouses. factories. homes. and other physical environments.

Elon Musk has said this would lead to an “infinite money glitch. ” in which people no longer have to work and can rely on a universal income. Chavez said he doesn’t doubt humanoids will eventually proliferate. but Robot.com’s near-term roadmap is grounded in the less glamorous parts of service work: sorting. moving. and handing items off.

At the moment, Chavez said Robot.com has around 20 customers. He said they’re thinking less about replacing workers and more about improving workforce satisfaction and reducing turnover. “The people that are working right now are going to feel better,” he said. “They’re going to maybe not do that repetitive tasks and focus on customer-centric experience and not resign after seven months.”.

That tension—between robotics as replacement and robotics as relief—matters in the numbers behind service-sector work. Chavez pointed to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that in 2024 there were about 3.8 million fast-food and counter workers. 3 million “laborers and freight. stock. and material movers. ” and 2.8 million stockers and order fillers.

Robotics leaders outside Robot.com have made similar promises: humans upskilled, not displaced. Companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have pitched optimistic outcomes like that. But the scale of “simple jobs” is hard to ignore. and the companies still have to contend with a workforce that relies on those roles.

Chavez said humans will still be essential in a robotic future. He pointed to the idea of humans maintaining and guiding Waymo robotaxis at remote centers, and to humans training humanoids through teleoperation.

He also used the solarpunk movement to describe his vision—a direct contrast to the dystopian cyberpunk idea of humans pushed to the margins of a robot-run world. In Robot.com’s ad, humans peacefully co-exist with their robot counterparts. They could be delivered a cup of coffee along their daily commute. They could even wave hello, as Robot.com imbues its machines with some personality.

Maybe, Chavez’s story suggests, they’ll be served a yogurt ad along the way.

Robot.com Felipe Chavez robotics automation warehouse robots delivery robots food service robots advertising robots humanoid robots Silicon Valley robotics workforce turnover