Event Concierges and Guide Robots: What Airports, Expos and Stadiums Show

The job, and which parts machines reach

O*NET, the US Labor Department's occupation database, files ushers, lobby attendants and ticket takers under SOC 39-3031.00. Its core tasks run from selling and checking tickets to cleaning, helping wheelchair users, keeping order, greeting patrons and giving directions.¹ The occupation employed 124,500 people in 2025, at a median wage of $15.82 an hour, and O*NET's BLS-based projection is growth of 1% to 2% from 2025 to 2035.¹⁶ Two neighboring roles do similar front-of-house work: restaurant and lounge hosts (SOC 35-9031.00, 444,200 employed in 2025), who greet and seat guests,¹⁷ and concierges (SOC 39-6012.00, 50,200 employed).¹⁸

The systems aimed at this work come in three shapes. Mobile robots roam a hall and lead people to places. Screen-based assistants, from kiosks to "digital humans" (animated on-screen faces that talk back in real time), answer questions where travelers stop. And computer vision, AI that interprets camera images, checks faces at gates and logs objects. The scorecard above grades each against the role's tasks; the cases below show how they were run, what they cost, and in several cases how they ended.

Incheon's first fleet: AIRSTAR, 2018 to 2025

Incheon International Airport put its AIRSTAR guide robot into service in 2018. The hardware came from Pureun Technology and the software from LG CNS. Fourteen units worked the departure and arrival halls of Terminals 1 and 2: told a flight, a robot showed the check-in counter and escorted the traveler there; it also gave congestion levels, security-screening rules and baggage-carousel locations, and took souvenir photos.³

The airport operator said it invested 2.8 billion won in the robots and their control system. When its contract with LG CNS expired, technical support stopped; broken parts could no longer be repaired, so each unit was discarded when it failed. All 14 were gone by 2025, about seven years after launch, and the operator said that for technical-security reasons they could not be sold, donated or reused. Six luggage-cart robots for passengers such as pregnant women and older people, bought for 900 million won in November 2020, stopped running in December 2025. By January 2026 the only robots still moving through the terminals were 17 leased cleaning robots, costing 343 million won.³

The 2026 fleet: generative AI, patrol mode and check-in on wheels

In January 2026 the operator planned 19 "patrol and guide robots" for 1.85 billion won.³ On May 18, 2026 it announced a larger fleet of 31 robots of three types, already working. Ten self check-in robots, five per terminal, drive to crowded counters and check passengers in like a kiosk on wheels; in Terminal 2 they serve Korean Air, Asiana Airlines and Jin Air flights. Nineteen guide/patrol robots (nine in Terminal 1, ten in Terminal 2) and two docent robots, which explain artworks at two exhibition spots, complete the fleet. The Kyunghyang Shinmun reported costs of 136 million won per check-in robot and 95 million won per guide/patrol or docent robot.⁷

The guide robots now use generative AI, a large language model, for spoken conversation. A passenger presses one of four language buttons (Korean, English, Chinese or Japanese) and asks about facilities, flights or congestion; by voice, French and Spanish are added. Asked for somewhere to eat, the robot picks a route from its location and walks the passenger there.¹³ In an emergency the same robots switch to patrol mode and stream the scene to the control room in real time. A private 5G network and a "digital twin", a live software model of the terminal, show every robot's position and status.⁸ A Clobot–LG CNS consortium said in October 2024 that it had signed the airport's contract to build the multi-robot and digital-twin control system.¹⁹

The airport calls the check-in robot a world first and says it is "expected" to cut waiting times.⁸ It has published no waiting-time, usage or satisfaction figures for either fleet, so the benefit side of the ledger is still empty.

Digital humans: DFW Airport's Iris

Dallas Fort Worth International Airport tested an on-screen "digital human concierge" near gate A-34 in Terminal A, built with IBM Watson and Soul Machines; the airport said the first phase ended on June 25, 2021, and that it would use the results to judge the concierge's potential.²⁰ A second phase, "Digital Iris", went into Terminal B information kiosks in June 2022. Each kiosk has a directional microphone, a speaker and a camera that detects an approaching traveler; Soul Machines animated the face, and IBM's Watson Assistant handled the questions. Soul Machines' October 2022 release called it a pilot program, said Iris had "already managed thousands of conversations", described it as designed to augment airport support staff, and said DFW planned to expand it across the airport.¹⁴

We found no later statement from DFW on whether Iris is still running. Soul Machines was placed in receivership in February 2026, according to New Zealand's NBR.²¹ Its status at DFW is unknown, so it is graded here as a pilot that ran in 2021–2022.

Stadiums and expos: what changed between the plan and the event

The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee announced in 2019 that Toyota's Human Support Robot (HSR) and Delivery Support Robot (DSR) would help spectators in wheelchair seating at the Olympic Stadium, carrying food and goods, guiding people to their seats and giving event information.²² The Games were postponed and then held without spectators. Toyota says the HSR was then used only at the Paralympic Games, where it no longer guided anyone to seats; it handed out water, collected trash and took photos for event staff, and operators steered and spoke through the units remotely from Toyota City.⁶ The planned seat-guidance service, the part that matched an usher's task, never took place, so it doesn't count in the scorecard.

Expo 2025 Osaka took a similar mix of plans. Researchers led by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) said in late 2024 that about 40 robots, including androids, would be prepared for the "Future of Life" pavilion, several of them remote-controlled avatars that online visitors could steer through the hall.²³ Those are teleoperated, a person controlling the robot from elsewhere, and we found no post-event results from the organizers, so they are not graded as AI doing the work. NEC said 51 Expo admission gates would add face recognition for season- and summer-pass holders, reading the ticket's QR code and then checking the face to stop passes being lent; that account is the vendor's.⁹

The clearest production case at a venue gate is baseball's. At Oracle Park, all main gates offer MLB Go-Ahead Entry: fans aged 18 or over who opt in through the MLB Ballpark app are authenticated by camera, and their tickets are scanned automatically once identified.² For an enrolled fan, the ticket taker's check is done by the system.

Museums, wheelchairs and lost property

In spring 2018 the Smithsonian put Pepper humanoid robots, donated by SoftBank Robotics, into six of its spaces as an experimental program: to draw people into under-visited galleries, translate Kiswahili phrases at the National Museum of African Art, increase interaction between visitors and docents at the Hirshhorn, and orient visitors at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.¹¹ We found no published results from the pilot. Reuters reported in 2021, citing sources, that SoftBank had stopped producing Pepper in 2020, after about 27,000 were made.²⁴

Wheelchair help is where a machine most plainly does an usher's task alone. At Haneda, the terminal operator Japan Airport Terminal, Japan Airlines and WHILL began trials in November 2019, and self-driving chairs entered service on July 1, 2020. A passenger boards at a station, picks the departure gate, rides there at 2.5 km/h, and the empty chair drives itself back. In June 2021 the operator said it was replacing staff-pushed wheelchairs to save ground staff work and cut infection risk; nine units were deployed, with 24 planned.⁴ WHILL said in August 2026 that 37 units now cover Haneda's domestic terminal areas and Terminal 3, at about 10,000 rides a month (vendor-stated).⁵

Lost property is a quieter case. Jaipur International Airport says an AI-powered camera now photographs and logs every found item with its description, location, date and time, and that over 85% of lost items were returned in the three months before its December 2025 announcement.¹² It gave no earlier return rate, so the figure isn't a measured improvement.

What remains a person's job, and what's unmeasured

Emergency evacuation is the clearest gap. In a 2016 Georgia Tech Research Institute study, 42 volunteers in a mock fire followed an "Emergency Guide Robot", secretly driven by a researcher, even after it had led some of them into the wrong room and others had been told it was broken.¹⁰ No venue or airport case of a robot guiding people out in a real emergency was found. Settling disputes over seats also remains with staff; the nearest product is Eventbase's Event Copilot, a voice-driven generative-AI concierge in event apps, whose maker says early adopters report a 70% staff workload reduction, without naming them.¹⁵

Across every case here, operators have disclosed costs but no measured benefits: no waiting times, staffing hours or satisfaction scores before and after. What the record does show is lifespan. Incheon's first guide robots lasted about seven years, and ended when vendor support did.³