The excitement surrounding humanoid robots has led to massive valuations for companies like Figure AI, which closed over $1 billion in September 2025 at a post-money valuation of $39 billion. Unitree, another leading robot maker, saw its valuation reach $66 billion after its IPO, with shares gaining 600% on debut. However, despite these impressive financial figures, analysts and industry experts are increasingly skeptical about the immediate commercialization and profitability of general-purpose humanoid robots.
Industry insiders, including Unitree's CEO Wang Xingxing, warn that practical, general-purpose application of robots is still at least a decade away. They emphasize that while hardware has advanced, the AI needed to control these complex machines is still in its infancy, operating at only about 10% of human brain capacity. The current marketing of humanoid robots is seen as largely hype, with investor expectations far exceeding present technological capabilities and practical use cases.
Businesses are primarily interested in the lowest cost per task at acceptable quality, a metric where purpose-built robots consistently outperform humanoids. Robots designed for specific tasks, such as those used by Gritt for solar farms or Agility in industrial settings, are already deployed in the field and creating value. In contrast, general-purpose humanoids remain largely confined to laboratories, unable to perform value-creating work reliably or affordably. Production costs for humanoid robots are also prohibitively high, needing to be cut by more than half for mass commercialization.
While some predict that AI-powered humanoid robots will eventually sort and pick items on production lines, leading to potential job losses in manufacturing (estimated at 14% over five years by Nash Squared), their widespread adoption is constrained by their lack of reliability and cost-effectiveness compared to specialized automation. Operations executives prioritize throughput, reliability, and cost reduction, which are currently better served by purpose-built machines like forklifts or conveyors that eliminate unnecessary complexity.
