Walmart and Target are buying robots at record numbers. Here's why your job is safe

Noelle Harff, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Aug 14, 2026

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Retailers are buying robots in record numbers, and you’ve probably seen them in stores around San Diego.

San Diego robotics company Brain Corp has deployed more than 50,000 robots around the world with its AI software and reported record growth of 68% in sales this year. Now these robots are working overtime in stores from Walmart and Sam’s Club to Target, taking inventory and scrubbing floors.

Brain Corp has been around since 2009 and has raised more than $220 million building robots to automate jobs that are “dull, dangerous and dirty,” said John Black, chief technology officer at Brain Corp.

Brain Corp builds the brains inside robots. Their most well-known robots look like small Zambonis, autonomously cleaning grocery store aisles. And the company’s newest bot software automizes of the dullest jobs in retail — counting boxes.

Today, some retail employees spend an entire eight-hour shift walking aisle by aisle, scanning item by item, counting inventory. Those monotonous and tedious tasks are exactly what robots are for, Black said.

The 6-foot-tall pole, fitted with cameras and wheels, often does a better job than a person.

A viral video has spread across the internet showing a human warehouse employee working alongside a robot. The livestream captures every time the human clocks in for a shift or clocks out for a bathroom break. Meanwhile, the robot continues.

In the first half of 2026, Brain Corp’s robots ran more than 5.3 million hours — the equivalent of 600 years of continuous autonomous operation, according to the company.

But despite the viral videos of robots that spread online, most of the autonomous robots Brain Corp power look nothing like people.

Adding faces, legs and dozens of extra joints adds complexity, not value. “The best robots are actually the ones that you don’t notice. They don’t get the most headlines,” Black said. He then referenced viral videos of robots uncontrollably dancing and kicking children.

He said the viral robot clips that look fun on TikTok or YouTube are “super sketchy” from a safety engineer’s point of view, because these machines are big and powerful enough to cause real harm.

And some jobs in retail can’t be automated, Black said.

“Robots are very good at repetitive, physically demanding and highly predictable tasks,” Black said. “People remain far better suited for roles that involve judgment.”

Robots still can’t reliably do even relatively menial tasks like restocking.

Black pointed to an infamous Google DeepMind clip in which a robot was tasked with restocking the chip aisle — and it looked like the Terminator took on Tostitos.

It was impressive how the robot identified which bags of chips were which and found the correct place and price for each. But the robot had no idea how to handle the bags themselves, and it ended up crushing and throwing them. The recently released Gen 2 robots, however, seem to be improving on their dexterity.

To understand what a robot can and can’t do, it helps to look at how it perceives its environment.

Today’s robots build a picture of the world by scanning their surroundings and stitching pixels together into a map. But to a robot, a pixel is a pixel. It has no way of knowing that the pixels forming a wall are rigid and immovable, while the pixels forming a birthday cake are soft and edible.

Weight, permanence and texture — none of that registers. A robot simply detects that something is there, then matches it against categories it was trained to recognize. Brain Corp’s robots in retail stores, airports and warehouses can identify objects without ever understanding them.

But the robots are getting smarter. Today, Brain Corp is working with the University of California San Diego to create a semantic map that can help robots comprehend the physical world around them. By adding cameras and AI models, robots can begin to understand objects, not just identify them.

“That’s the holy grail for robotics — the robot just sees an image, understands the task it’s supposed to do, and handles everything else inside a black box,” Black said. “I’d say 10 to 20 years to be really commercially available.”