At the 2026 Zhiyuan Innovation Day main forum, Zhiyuan co-founder and
co-president Yao Maoqing, head of the embodied-business unit, said embodied AI
is moving from showpiece demonstrations to real deployment. The market test, he
said, is 24/7 stable operation in real environments, resilience to disturbances
and clear ROI. Yao urged a shift from stacking isolated capabilities to building
a continuous closed loop: every real operation must produce data, accumulate
experience and feed back into models and systems so robots can transition from
"can do once" to "do well consistently," making physical AI measurable,
reproducible and scalable.
