I flew to Dublin last week as part of the team representing Node4 at a Microsoft Sales and Partner summit. But the event itself is not really relevant here — what struck me was the amount of robot tech I interacted with on the trip.

At Heathrow Terminal 5, I took one of the self-driving pods that connect the business car park with the terminal. Inside, Mitie’s robot cleaning machines were gliding quietly between travellers. And in Dublin Airport, our restaurant meal was brought out by a robot waitress called Bella.

It was only later that I realised these weren’t isolated novelties. They’re part of a pattern: we’re used to talking about agentic computing in a software sense but it also presents itself through hardware in the physical world.

The journey begins: autonomous pods at Heathrow

The Heathrow pods have been around for over a decade, but they still feel futuristic. You call one on demand, climb in, and it glides directly to your stop. There’s no driver, no timetable, and almost no wait. The system uses far less energy than a bus or car, and the whole thing is orchestrated by software that dispatches pods, avoids collisions and monitors usage.

It’s a neat demonstration of automation in motion: you make a request, and a machine physically carries it out.

Quiet efficiency: Mitie’s cleaning “cobots”

Inside the terminal, Mitie’s autonomous cleaning robots were at work. These cobots use sensors and cameras to map the concourse, clean for hours, then return to charge before resuming their shifts. They handle repetitive tasks while human staff focus on the harder jobs.

You could easily miss them — and that’s the point. They’re designed to blend in. The building, in a sense, is starting to help maintain itself.

Meet Bella: the robot waitress

In Dublin, things got more personal. The restaurant’s “BellaBot” rolled over with trays of food, blinking her animated eyes and purring polite phrases. The QR code was hard to scan (black text on a brass plate lacks contrast) and the ordering app didn’t work so human staff had to step in — but the experience was still surreal.

Bella’s design deliberately humanises the machine, using expressions and voice to make diners comfortable. For me, it was a bit too much. The technology was interesting; the personality, less so. I prefer my service robots less anthropomorphised.

This tension — between automation and human comfort — is one of the trickiest design challenges of our time.

A pattern emerges

Taken together, the pods, cleaning cobots and BellaBot reveal different layers of the same trend:

• Mobility agents like the Heathrow pods move people and goods.
• Maintenance agents like Mitie’s cobots quietly maintain infrastructure.
• Service agents like BellaBot interact directly with us.

Each one extends software intelligence into the physical world. We’re no longer just automating data; we’re automating action.

And none of them works completely alone. The pods are overseen by a control centre. The cobots have human supervisors. Bella needs a human backup when the tech fails. This is automation with a safety net — hybrid systems that rely on graceful human fallback.

From airports to high streets

You don’t have to go through Heathrow or Dublin to see the same shift happening.

Closer to home, in Milton Keynes and Northampton (as well as in other towns and cities across the UK and more widely), small white Starship robots deliver groceries and takeaway food along pavements. They trundle quietly across zebra crossings, avoiding pedestrians and pets, using cameras and sensors to navigate. A smartphone app summons them; another unlocks the lid when your order arrives.

Like the airport pods, they make autonomy feel normal. Children wave to them. People barely notice them anymore. The line between software, service and physical action is blurring fast.

The thin end of the wedge

These examples show how automation is creeping into daily life — not replacing humans outright, but augmenting us.

The challenge now isn’t capability; it’s reliability. Systems like Bella’s ordering app work brilliantly until they don’t. What matters most is how smoothly they fail and how easily humans can step back in.

For now, that balance still needs work. But it’s clear where things are heading. The real frontier of AI isn’t in chatbots or copilots — it’s in physical agents that move, clean, deliver and serve. It’s software made tangible.

And while Bella’s blinking eyes may have been a step too far for me, it’s hard not to admire the direction of travel. The future isn’t just digital. It’s autonomous, electric, slightly quirky – and already waiting for you in the car park.

Featured image: created by ChatGPT.