I’m a Senior Software Engineer with a strong focus on software architecture, designing secure and scalable systems across automotive, embedded, banking and energy domains.
Service Robots Are Learning to Drive: Lessons from Autonomous Vehicles
A robotaxi changes lanes to avoid a double-parked truck while a passenger asks it to play 80s hip-hop and wants to know when the Giants game starts. That scene opens Jochen Wirtz’s article on generative AI robots in Harvard Business Review, which I read in HBR Türkiye’s June 2026 issue. Wirtz, a long-time researcher on service robots, argues that generative AI will finally make robots useful in hotels, hospitals, restaurants and shops: places where service has always depended on people.
I have spent years teaching cameras to understand the world around a car, so the Waymo opening caught my attention for a different reason. Autonomous driving is the one field where robots already move among the public at scale, and it has spent fifteen years learning, often the hard way, what it takes to make that safe. Service robots are about to go through the same lessons. This post summarises Wirtz’s article and then looks at it through that lens.
