Reporter Bought a $4,000 Robot Dog From China

A reporter at Ars Technica bought a robot dog from Chinese company Unitree for $4,000 and spent months testing what it could actually do. His conclusion: Unitree might be the most important robotics company in the world, not just a maker of expensive toys.

What matters isn't the specific gadget but the speed at which Chinese firms are pushing affordable autonomous robots into the mass market: hardware that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and stayed in labs is now sold almost like a home appliance. Alongside it, demand is growing for the software layer that connects such hardware to real business tasks.

Check which processes in your company could be automated today without waiting for a robot: request tracking, document reconciliation, regular reports for management. While robots are still learning to walk around an office, a digital one is already ready to work there: in 1Cifer, every role gets its own AI agent that answers from company data and runs tasks without buying any hardware.