Dive Brief:
- Seven-Eleven Japan, the Japanese arm of 7-Eleven parent Seven & i Holdings, is working with robotics company Telexistence to develop a humanoid robot to work in its c-stores, according to a Tuesday announcement.
- The robots, called “Astra,” will employ generative AI using a vision-language-action foundation model, the announcement said. The companies expect to have the robots in stores sometime in 2029.
- The goal of this initiative is to boost efficiency and “transform the very role of employees in convenience stores,” according to the announcement.
Dive Insight:
With labor a continuing pressure on the c-store industry, Astra’s ability to take over rote tasks can help Seven-Eleven Japan save money and alleviate pressure from workforce shortages.
“Robots will take on routine in-store operations, allowing employees to focus on services that only humans can deliver — strengthening store appeal and creating new value for customers,” Telexistence said in the announcement.
The partnership has three goals: identify the best tasks to automate and verify the effectiveness of robots in them, develop humanoid robots that are prepared for real-world in-store challenges and build a large-scale robot operation dataset to improve AI training.
The initiative is expected to “accelerate dataset development and practical implementation of AI-powered robots,” according to the announcement.
Telexistence already has some experience with Seven-Eleven Japan, which is also piloting Ghost, Telexistence’s beverage restocking robot, in select stores in Tokyo, according to a separate announcement this week.
The scale of Seven-Eleven Japan’s operations — it has around 20,000 stores in the country — will provide a plethora of training data.
“This will enable end-to-end integration of perception, planning, and control — bringing humanoid robots into practical use faster and at greater scale than any competitor,” the announcement said.
