{"id":9183,"date":"2025-10-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9183"},"modified":"2025-10-20T15:06:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T14:06:53","slug":"when-software-meets-steel-agentic-computing-in-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2025\/10\/when-software-meets-steel-agentic-computing-in-the-real-world.htm","title":{"rendered":"When software meets steel: agentic computing in the real world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I flew to Dublin last week as part of the team representing Node4<\/a> at a Microsoft Sales and Partner summit. But the event itself is not really relevant here \u2014 what struck me was the amount of robot tech I interacted with on the trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Heathrow Terminal 5, I took one of the self-driving pods that connect the business car park with the terminal. Inside, Mitie\u2019s robot cleaning machines were gliding quietly between travellers. And in Dublin Airport, our restaurant meal was brought out by a robot waitress called Bella<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was only later that I realised these weren\u2019t isolated novelties. They\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journey begins: autonomous pods at Heathrow<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Heathrow pods<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a neat demonstration of automation in motion: you make a request, and a machine physically carries it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quiet efficiency: Mitie\u2019s cleaning \u201ccobots\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Inside the terminal, Mitie\u2019s autonomous cleaning robots<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could easily miss them \u2014 and that\u2019s the point. They\u2019re designed to blend in. The building, in a sense, is starting to help maintain itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meet Bella: the robot waitress<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Dublin, things got more personal. The restaurant\u2019s \u201cBellaBot\u201d rolled over<\/a> 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\u2019t work so human staff had to step in \u2014 but the experience was still surreal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bella\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This tension \u2014 between automation and human comfort \u2014 is one of the trickiest design challenges of our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pattern emerges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Taken together, the pods, cleaning cobots and BellaBot reveal different layers of the same trend:<\/p>\n\n\n\n