A look at South Korean conglomerate Naver's experiments with a fleet of ~100 office robots, including efforts to make employees comfortable with their presence
Naver, a South Korean internet firm, is trying to introduce robots into the world of cubicles and conference rooms without making employees uncomfortable. Tweets: @daiwaka , @stanhoraczek , @tanzinavega , @prefabclout , @bizboyle , and @johnjyoon Tweets: Daisuke Wakabayashi / @daiwaka : Robots are frequently used in factories, and in hospitality but they're still rare in the white-collar workplaces of offices and cubicles. Korea's Naver is working on how to turn robots into polite and useful office mates. w/ @johnjyoon https://www.nytimes.com/... Stan Horaczek / @stanhoraczek : I'm going to have a drawn out “will they or won't they?” Relationship with the office robot even though it already has a robot fiancé. We'll eventually make love, but it won't work out and we'll make it awkward for everyone in the office until one of us quits. https://twitter.com/... Tanzina Vega / @tanzinavega : Those used to be called internships or entry level jobs. https://twitter.com/... @prefabclout : If you're a normal person and know that coffee breaks are only partly about obtaining coffee, in addition to standing up and socializing, you'd know just how fast these things need to be destroyed. Excuse to take away your coffee break 100% https://twitter.com/... Matthew Boyle / @bizboyle : “Putting the robot at the back of the elevator made humans uncomfortable...” https://www.nytimes.com/... John Yoon / @johnjyoon : This South Korean company is trying to integrate robots into office life — without making employees uncomfortable or violating their privacy. @daiwaka and I spent time at Naver's robot-friendly building to find out how the robots work. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece sits early in a five-year arc of Naver treating its own offices as a robotics lab. It followed pandemic-era thinking about robots filling gaps left by distancing and worker shortages, and it preceded two proof points: Naver's decision, after more than a year of testing, to commercialize its Rookie helper robots for outside companies, and the 1784 tower where thousands of employees now work alongside a larger robot fleet.
First-order effects
- Naver's own employees become the test population: the company's immediate challenge is behavioral, designing robots that deliver meals and parcels without triggering discomfort or privacy concerns in cubicles and conference rooms.
- Each interaction generates operational data on how humans and robots share white-collar space — data no factory or hotel deployment provides.
Second-order effects
- Once the etiquette playbook is proven internally, Naver can sell the hardware-plus-know-how package to other companies, turning an HR problem into a product line via the Rookie robots opened to external customers.
- The experiment feeds the built environment itself: lessons from the ~100-robot pilot scale directly into the 1784 tower's 120+ robot fleet, making office design a competitive input for Naver's AI ambitions.
Third-order effects
- If acceptance engineering becomes a repeatable discipline, white-collar workplaces shift from robot-free zones to testbeds where firms like Naver validate service robotics before selling it — mirroring how Telexistence pairs store robots with remote human operators in Japanese retail.
- Office robotics then consolidates around companies that control both the physical fleet and the workplace data it produces, raising the bar for rivals without an owned test environment.
The trend: Service robotics is migrating from factories and hospitality into white-collar offices, with employee acceptance — not technical capability — as the gating factor for commercialization.