Something happened with robots this week and it’s been needling away at me in that “this is a cultural hinge-point, isn’t it?” sort of way.
Regular viewers know that I'm mildly obsessed with robots and where we are with them going mainstream. You don't get much more mainstream than Simon Cowell's 'America's got Talent' (AGT). It may not have the zillions watching that it used to have in 2006 - but it doesn't just show people playing spoons or getting their dogs to tapdance either.
Here we have a 26-year-old bloke called Yufei Wu walked onto the AGT stage. Soft-spoken. Minimal patter. The judges do the familiar face: polite interest, faint bafflement, waiting for the trick. And then – one by one – eight humanoid robots walked out behind him.
The audience didn’t so much cheer as … malfunction. It was a scream, but a weird one. More like: my brain hasn’t got the firmware for this yet.
Then the music started - Lady Gaga’s 'Abracadabra'. And the robots danced.
Not the usual “look, it can raise an arm” lab clip that gets breathlessly posted on LinkedIn by people who also clap for Powerpoints (OK, sometimes me). Proper choreography. In sync. Energy. Timing. Somersaults. Simon Cowell – who has spent two decades monetising human vulnerability on prime-time telly – sat there with his mouth open. If Cowell is your barometer for surprise, the mercury just went through the glass.
The important bit isn’t the dancing, though. It’s where the dancing happened.
This wasn’t a robotics conference, a CES booth or a carefully-lit corporate demo where the CEO says “game-changing” five times and no one makes eye contact. It was mainstream entertainment – primetime US TV via a format designed to make ordinary people feel something quickly, in public, with judges standing in as proxies for the rest of us.
And that’s the tell. Unitree (the company behind the G1 humanoids) didn’t choose AGT to impress engineers. They chose it to +normalise+ robots. To land them in a context where the scorecard isn’t “technical capability” but “did it give you goosebumps?”
It did. Even for Cowell, who is essentially robot-proof.
These are Unitree G1s, by the way – the kind you can actually buy. The same base platform that’s appearing in warehouses and research labs. Depending on spec and supply, you’re into “decent second-hand car” money. And they’ve just done a somersault on live television to Lady Gaga.
Now, if you’re an estate agent, portal, or proptech leader, you might be thinking: lovely, but what’s that got to do with valuations in Wokingham?
Everything – and nothing. Because this is how adoption happens. Not as a business case deck, but as a social moment. The point where “robot in your business” stops sounding like an eccentric founder’s hobby and starts sounding like: 'why don’t you have one of those?' The same way smartphones felt faintly unnecessary right up until the second they became non-negotiable.
The property industry won’t be first to buy humanoids, but it might be first to need them in public-facing ways – concierge, on-site leasing, new-build suites, events. Because we’re in the feelings business, really. Confidence, reassurance, trust.
Three minutes. Go and watch it. Then tell me we’re still twenty years away.
Join me on the Rightmove Resistance Tour 3 - The Tipping Point, to learn more about using AI in your business to win market share, cut costs - particularly portal costs! - and increase revenue. Go to www.modelprop.ai/summer26