KDDI and Avita have formed a partnership to develop humanoid robots for customer-facing roles across retail, healthcare, entertainment, and cultural venues. The collaboration, announced at MWC Barcelona, actual service environments.
Avita brings expertise in avatar creation, conversational AI, and remote operation technologies. KDDI provides communications infrastructure and data systems supporting real-time robot operation. The companies plan to leverage GPU resources at KDDI’s Osaka Sakai Data Center, which opened in January 2026, plus on-premises services for Google’s generative AI model Gemini.
The concept humanoid features compact skeletal structure approximating average Japanese physique, silicone skin enabling warm facial expressions, quiet pneumatic actuation allowing fluid human-like movement, and embedded eyeball cameras for natural gaze tracking. Design emphasizes approachability over industrial functionality—critical for service roles requiring customer trust.
The partnership also marks launch of Avita’s new humanoid and Physical AI business unit focused on development, sale, and operation of service-oriented humanoid robots.
Initial deployment targets include au retail stores and other KDDI service locations. Evolving demographic reality in Japan -a high proportion of aging population, intensifies labour shortages across service sectors. Humanoid robots offer potential relief for routine customer interaction while freeing human staff for complex problem-solving and other such roles.
