How a Building Concierge's Job Is Shared With Robots and AI
Delivery robots that ride elevators now carry towels, coffee and parcels in hotels and office towers, and text bots answer guests' questions. Reservations, bookings and special requests still go to a human concierge.
Checked against the O*NET 31.0 task list for Concierges (39-6012.00), NAVER LABS' description of ARC and ROBOPORT at NAVER 1784 (April 2024), Relay Robotics' elevator-integration statement (April 2024), KONE's Service Robot API (April 2025) and Accor's ALL Concierge launch (September 2026)
Role scorecard
Concierges SOC 39-6012.00
- Core tasks AI does in production3 of 7
- Most mature evidenceIn production
- Cost$2,000 a month per delivery robot (owner-stated, 2017)
- BenefitAbout 60% fewer information calls (operator-stated, 2018)
As of · Tasks: O*NET 31.01
| Core task (O*NET) | What AI or robots do | Extent | Evidence grade | Example case | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Provide information about local features, such as shopping, dining, nightlife, or recreational destinations | A text bot answers guests' questions about nearby bars and restaurants and hands harder requests to staff | Does it | In production | EDWARD SMS bot at 12 Radisson Blu Edwardian hotels, Edwardian Hotels London, from 2016 (later status not published) | 2, 3 |
| Make reservations for patrons, such as for dinner, spa treatments, or golf tee times, and obtain tickets to special events | Guest-facing bots pass ticket and booking requests to the human concierge; one vendor says its AI books tables and treatments itself | Not yet | Vendor claim | Rose at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas referred sold-out show tickets to the concierge, 2017; Conduit product page, 2026 | 4, 5 |
| Provide directions to guests | An on-screen digital human at information kiosks answered gate, restaurant and map questions alongside airport staff | Assists | Pilot | Digital Iris (Soul Machines with IBM Watson) at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, 2021–2022 (no later status published) | 6, 7 |
| Order flowers for guests | No operator case found; a vendor says its AI arranges in-room flowers with housekeeping | Not yet | Vendor claim | Conduit product page, 2026 | 5 |
| Pick up and deliver items or run errands for guests | Delivery robots carry coffee, meals, toiletries and documents to rooms and desks, riding elevators on their own; staff load them | Does it | In production | Rookie robots at NAVER 1784, NAVER, since 2022; Relay at Fairfield Inn & Suites San Marcos, RAR Hospitality, 2017 | 8, 9 |
| Book airline or train tickets, reserve rental cars, or arrange shuttle service for guests | No operator case found; a vendor says its AI books private airport transfers and confirms them with the guest | Not yet | Vendor claim | Conduit product page, 2026 | 5 |
| Receive, store, or deliver luggage or mail | A robot arm stores guests' bags in lobby bins; building robots deliver parcels to employees' desks | Does it | In production | YOBOT at YOTEL New York (operator page, 2026); Rookie package delivery at NAVER 1784, since 2022 | 10, 11 |
Extent and grade follow our evidence grades: "Does it" needs a production case where AI performs the task on its own; "Assists" means AI helps a person do it; "Not yet" means only prototypes, vendor claims or nothing. The table shows 7 of the 16 core tasks O*NET lists for the role. For the other 9, including making travel arrangements for sightseeing tours, planning special events, arranging childcare, carrying out unusual requests and assisting guests with special needs, we found no case at any grade, not even a vendor claim, so they're left out rather than graded. "Does it" for deliveries means the robot carries the item without a person walking it there; a staff member still loads it. YOBOT is a programmed robot arm, not a learning system.
Costs and benefits
| Delivery robot lease | $2,000 per month under a three-year agreement, one Relay robot for a 116-room hotel (hotel owner RAR Hospitality, May 2017)9 |
|---|---|
| Delivery robot pricing model | "Low thousands per month," including support, hardware and maintenance (Savioke, Relay's maker, vendor-stated, May 2016)12 |
| Information calls | Approximately 60% fewer phone calls requesting information since EDWARD launched in 2016 (Edwardian Hotels London, operator-stated, May 2018)3 |
| Hotel robot deliveries | More than 1.5 million deliveries by robots installed in hundreds of hotels (Relay Robotics, vendor-stated, April 2024)13 |
| Apartment door-to-door delivery | Average 20 minutes from order to delivery across about 200 test deliveries, with no safety incidents (Woowa Brothers, company-stated, December 2021)14 |
Seen at work
How it works
The job, task by task
O*NET, the US Labor Department's occupation database, files concierges under code 39-6012.00 and lists 16 core tasks for them, led by giving information about local shopping, dining and nightlife (importance 90 of 100), making reservations and getting tickets (83) and giving directions (82). About 50,200 people held the job in the US in 2025, at a median wage of $18.73 an hour, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures shown on O*NET.1 The work happens in hotel lobbies, residential towers and office buildings, and so do the machines that now take parts of it. They split into two families: robots that move things through a building, and software that answers questions, from lobby kiosks and in-room speakers to text-message bots. Neither family has taken on the tasks that need negotiation with outside businesses, such as booking a table or finding tickets.
Delivery robots that ride the elevator
A hotel delivery robot is a lockable bin on wheels. Relay, a robot developed by Savioke and now sold by Relay Robotics, finds its way with lidar, a laser range sensor, on a map of every floor that installers annotate with room numbers and elevator positions; when it reaches a room it phones the guest and opens its lid once the door opens, according to the company's co-founder in 2016.12 Front-desk or kitchen staff load it and send it off. In 2017 the owner of the 116-room Fairfield Inn & Suites in San Marcos, California, said he leased one for $2,000 a month on a three-year agreement, and Savioke said that apart from small components installed in the elevator system, everything the robot needs is on board.9 The hard part is the elevator. Relay Robotics says its elevator technology supports cars from Otis, Schindler, TK and Mitsubishi.13 Elevator makers now sell the link directly: KONE's Service Robot API, an application programming interface, lets a robot call an elevator through KONE's control system and read the car's position, direction and status in real time.15
A building designed for robots
NAVER 1784, the company's second headquarters in South Korea, goes further. More than 100 robots, all driven from one cloud system called ARC, have delivered Starbucks coffee, lunch boxes, convenience-store orders and packages since 2022, all ordered from a single app; one robot model, Rookie, switches between those jobs as demand shifts through the day.8 The building, in the Bundang district of Seongnam, has eight basement levels and 28 floors.11 When a Rookie carries a package, it waits for a robot-only elevator, passes through gates that open as it approaches and hands the item over, and the recipient gets a notice in the company app.11 That elevator, ROBOPORT, runs ten carriers on 128-meter vertical rails, so robots don't have to queue with people for the passenger cars at rush hour.8 NAVER builds the robots and runs the building, so it is both maker and operator here.
Apartment complexes: delivery to the door
In residential towers the robot has to get through a locked entrance as well as the elevator. In December 2021 Woowa Brothers, which runs the Baemin delivery app, started door-to-door robot delivery at Gwanggyo Alleyway, a mixed-use apartment complex in Suwon: each of about 1,000 households got a QR code, and its Dilly Drive robot links to HDC Labs' home IoT server to pass the shared front door and to Hyundai Elevator's control system to call the elevator to the right floor. The service ran under a regulatory sandbox exemption from the Ministry of Science and ICT, because Korean law then barred delivery robots from sidewalks and parks.14 That makes it a pilot rather than routine service. In August 2026 the land ministry began consulting robot companies on a special act to allow mobile robots in apartment complexes and other shared spaces, after robot services had struggled to get beyond limited spaces such as demonstration projects, the paper reported.16
Information robots, kiosks and digital humans
Robots that stand in the lobby and talk have a shorter record. In March 2016 Hilton and IBM began piloting Connie, a robot stationed near reception at the Hilton McLean in Virginia that used IBM Watson and WayBlazer travel data to answer questions about hotel amenities and hours and to suggest local attractions, working alongside staff.17 No later results were published. At Henn na Hotel in Nagasaki, more than half of 243 robots were retired, including humanoid concierge robots, after they couldn't answer basic questions, The Week reported in January 2019, citing The Wall Street Journal.18 A digital human is a computer-animated person on a screen that talks back. Dallas Fort Worth International Airport tested one, combining Soul Machines' animation with IBM Watson, near gate A-34 until June 25, 2021;6 from June 2022 a pilot version called Digital Iris ran at Terminal B kiosks giving flight, gate, restaurant and map information, and had handled "thousands of conversations," Soul Machines said in October 2022.7 Soul Machines went into receivership in February 2026.19 The newest hotel case is a pilot: in August 2026 Astral Hotels said a self-service kiosk with an AI holographic avatar, built by EyeFeelIt, would check guests in at the Queen of Sheba Hotel in Eilat and recommend local restaurants and attractions, with a wider rollout still to be evaluated.20
In-room voice assistants
A smart speaker in the room can answer simple questions and route requests. Amazon launched Alexa for Hospitality in June 2018, and Marriott said guests at Charlotte Marriott City Center and Marriott Irvine Spectrum would be among the first to use it; they could ask for pool hours, order room service or ask Alexa to call the concierge for dinner recommendations, and Marriott said it would evaluate guest feedback before expanding.21 The recommendation itself still came from a person. Henn na Hotel's in-room assistant, Churi, was scrapped in the 2019 cull after it mistook a guest's snoring for commands and couldn't answer basic questions.18
Chat concierges, and the hand-off to staff
The text-message bot is the software that has stayed longest in live use. Edwardian Hotels London launched EDWARD at 12 Radisson Blu Edwardian hotels in May 2016: guests text it to request towels or room service, ask about local bars and restaurants, or complain, and natural language understanding (NLU), software that interprets free-form sentences, lets them write normally, with staff on hand when a request needs a person.2 By May 2018 the group said EDWARD had interacted with more than 400,000 guests and that phone calls asking for information had fallen by about 60 percent.3 The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas launched Rose, a text bot, in January 2017, with staff handling the requests it couldn't.22 Most of Rose's recommendations pointed to the resort's own bars and restaurants, and a request for tickets to a sold-out show got back the phone number of the hotel's human concierge.4 In September 2026 Accor took a generative chat assistant, ALL Concierge, from a pilot that began in July 2025 to a full launch in 11 languages; Accor says it answers in-stay questions and confirms hotel bookings, resolves most requests on its own and passes complex ones to support staff.23 The bookings Accor describes are for its hotels, not the dinner, spa and ticket reservations O*NET lists. One vendor, Conduit, says its agent books those too, along with airport transfers, but that is a product claim without a named operator.5
AI for the staff side
Some of the technology is aimed at the people behind the desk. Delivery robots are dispatched by staff, and hotels with small night shifts use them so the front desk doesn't have to leave its station, Savioke said in 2017.9 Alongside ALL Concierge, Accor announced The Butler, an AI assistant that gives hotel teams information, guidance and recommendations during the day and connects them to the right human expert; Accor hasn't said how many hotels use it.23 Across these cases the pattern is the same: machines carry objects and answer routine questions, and requests that involve judgment, a third-party booking or a guest's particular needs go back to a person.
Sources
- O*NET OnLine (O*NET 31.0), 39-6012.00 Concierges: tasks, wages and employment, retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Hotel Designs, Edwardian Hotels London launches 'virtual host' service, May 12, 2016.
- Edwardian Hotels London, Edwardian Hotels London Expands 'Virtual Host' to Meetings and Events (press release, PDF copy), May 14, 2018.
- Fortune, Meet Rose, the Sassy New Bot Concierge in Las Vegas, January 10, 2017.
- Conduit, AI Concierge for Hotels That Books, Coordinates, and Remembers Every Guest (product page), retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, DFW Airport Tests Digital Human Concierge to Elevate Customer Experience, July 1, 2021.
- Soul Machines via IBM Newsroom, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport Continues Collaboration with Soul Machines to Improve the Traveler's Experience with AI, October 11, 2022.
- NAVER LABS, Multi-Robot, Multi-Service, Multi-Floor, April 23, 2024.
- San Diego Business Journal, Relay robot at the Fairfield Inn & Suites San Marcos, May 18, 2017.
- YOTEL, YOTEL New York Times Square (hotel page and FAQ), retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Korea JoongAng Daily, At Naver 1784, robots scurry about and scrub other robots, April 14, 2022.
- AFAR, How hotel robots can improve your stay (interview with Savioke's co-founder), May 11, 2016.
- Relay Robotics, Canadian Hotel Industry Embraces Delivery Robots, April 15, 2024.
- Smart Today, 배민, 아파트 단지 '광교 앨리웨이'서 Door to Door 로봇배달 서비스 개시 (Baemin starts door-to-door robot delivery at Gwanggyo Alleyway), December 15, 2021.
- KONE Vietnam, KONE Vietnam Awarded Sao Khue 2025 for Service Robot API, April 21, 2025.
- CEO Score Daily, 배민·요기요, '로봇 배달' 대전 막 오른다 (Baemin and Yogiyo's robot-delivery race begins), August 14, 2026.
- eHotelier, Hilton and IBM pilot 'Connie' robot concierge (joint announcement), March 9, 2016.
- The Week, Japanese robot hotel pulls plug on droid staff (citing The Wall Street Journal), January 16, 2019.
- NBR, Soul Machines in receivership, February 9, 2026.
- The Jerusalem Post, Checking in and getting your room key from a hologram: Astral Hotels' new innovation, August 30, 2026.
- Amazon, Amazon Helps Hotels Offer New, Engaging Guest Experiences with Alexa for Hospitality, June 19, 2018.
- LODGING, The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Introduces Chatbot Concierge, January 10, 2017.
- LODGING, Accor Announces Launch of ALL Concierge, September 24, 2026.