What is Share of Life and why is it changing how we measure brands?
There are regions that for decades have pulsed to the rhythm of the combustion engine and forged steel. Wuhu, in China’s Anhui province, was for a long time an undisputed bastion of that traditional metallurgy. However, witnessing a delivery ceremony where entire fleets of humanoid robots —like the AiMOGA models, developed by the Chery ecosystem —are packaged for overseas export, you understand that a new era has begun.
This is not a rhetorical image: On July 30, 2026, Chery celebrated in Wuhu the delivery of the 2,000th AiMOGA robots worldwide, with a presence already in more than 60 countries and regions.
Just a year and a half earlier—at the end of 2025—the figure was 300 humanoids and 1,000 “robot dogs” in just over 30 countries. The growth is not linear, it is exponential.
And the flagship robot, with 41 degrees of freedom and hands of 12 degrees each, walks at the pace of a person (1 m/s), converses in ten languages with 95% accuracy and can learn a specific task of its trade in just one hour.
This is not a mere industrial anecdote or a quaint commercial diversification. We are witnessing the precise moment when heavy industry crosses the Rubicon to become the very architecture of everyday life.
And it’s not just Chery.
The global humanoid robot market, valued at approximately $6.2 billion in 2026, is projected to grow to over $165 billion by 2034 —a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50%. China currently accounts for around 90% of the units deployed worldwide. The question is no longer whether this will happen: it’s how quickly it will catch up with us.
The robots that are now coming out of factories that previously only produced engines are neither good nor bad. They are a reflection.
And what they reflect will depend entirely on the human intentions that programmed them. The challenge of this decade is not to contain the technological wave; it is to give it a soul. To design brands, products, and machines that, even though they walk on aluminum legs, still beat with a human heart.
Artificial intelligence stops looking at us from a screen
For thirty years we trained humanity to tilt its head toward a screen. That gesture—so intimate, so commonplace—defined an entire era of the relationship between people and technology. We were drawn to it. We were making the effort.
That order is being reversed.
The great technological transformation of this decade—the one we are witnessing in the newly converted factories of Asia, Europe, and America—proposes an infinitely more ambitious leap forward: AI is leaving the virtual realm to become embodied in the physical world. It is moving from processing data to moving atoms.
When artificial intelligence takes on form, articulation, and voice, it ceases to be a service we consult and becomes a presence we share. Humans no longer lower their heads: the machine walks toward us.
From building logos to designing behaviors
I began my professional career in an era when branding was synonymous with superficiality: a well-drawn symbol, elegant typography, a slogan that resonated with the consumer’s soul. That kind of branding was necessary, but it’s no longer sufficient. The branding of the future doesn’t ask how the brand looks. It asks how it moves, how it listens, how it rectifies a mistake in front of a customer, how it yields the right of way.
When an industrial company, born amidst engines and sheet metal, decides to manufacture bodies capable of interacting with people, it is declaring something much deeper than product diversification: it is saying, “I want to have a conversation with you, face to face, in your own space .” And that, in branding terms, is a silent revolution.
The robot that greets a visitor at a dealership, guides a passenger at a station, or accompanies someone in their daily routine doesn’t sell a product: it embodies a purpose. And if that purpose isn’t genuine, its very being betrays it before any reputation audit ever could.
It’s no longer about looking at a screen to find out what’s happening, but about sharing a square meter with a synthetic entity designed to reduce the friction of everyday life. The robots in Wuhu are not conceptual toys or aesthetic props; they are the vanguard of a new social infrastructure where the bit and the atom merge into a single experience.
Where the robot first touches the brands’ front end
This is the question every organization should be asking itself, and yet almost no one answers it accurately. Not all brand touchpoints transform at the same pace. There are at least six areas where the humanoid has already moved beyond the prototype stage and is now a real-world operation :
1. The dealership and the physical point of sale. It’s no coincidence that AiMOGA’s first commercial rollout outside of China was, in 2025, within automotive dealerships in Malaysia: reception, product presentation, and initial customer contact. The car selling itself, literally, through a body. It’s the most natural territory for a brand that manufactures objects: transforming its own showroom into the first stage for its new physical identity.
2. Retail and store security. In Chinese stores, humanoid robots now restock inventory, provide information, and monitor simultaneously. The brand that until yesterday competed for square meters of window display now competes for seconds of genuine attention in the aisle.
3. The major mobility hubs. Mornine, AiMOGA’s humanoid robot, works as an official volunteer at Wuhu’s high-speed rail station during China’s busiest time of year, the Lunar New Year exodus. She guides passengers, answers the same five questions thousands of times without changing her tone, and detects potentially dangerous situations on the platform. Airports, stations, terminals: where humans tire of repeating themselves, robots are just beginning to make their mark.
4. Events, trade shows, and brand activations. A marathon in Jiangyin, a football league in Changzhou, an international summit with over 4,000 attendees: “smart police” and assistance robotics are already being deployed on a large scale in these settings. For any brand, the massive event is the perfect laboratory for testing tangible branding without jeopardizing day-to-day operations.
5. Health, care, and hospitality. AiMOGA’s medical guidance robot (the Care line ) anticipates a sensitive but vast territory: hospitals, nursing homes, hotels. There, the standard is not efficiency, but perceived warmth. The robot that succeeds in healthcare will, paradoxically, be the most human of all.
6. After-sales service and ongoing support. Where today there is a call center or a customer service desk, tomorrow there may be a physical interface available full-time, without shifts or rotation, capable of maintaining the same brand tone at 3 p.m. and 3 a.m. This is perhaps the area with the greatest silent impact on long-term brand perception.
The pattern is clear. The robot adds more brand value not where it replaces a task, but where it maintains a constant presence that a human cannot sustain without becoming exhausted. That is the real battleground.
21st Century Branding
From the perspective of corporate strategy and brand building, this phenomenon blows up traditional approaches. During the last century, branding was built on flat surfaces: memorable logos, rigorous color palettes, slogans sculpted on paper and screens. Today, in the age of digital humanism, the crucial question any corporation must ask itself is no longer “What does my logo look like?” but “How does my brand behave when it comes to physical life in the real world?“
When a major industrial brand transcends its vehicle catalog to offer tangible interfaces, it becomes an active transmitter of cultural values. A humanoid robot stationed at the reception of a large company or interacting with a customer in a retail space ceases to be a cold instrument of automation; it transforms into the tangible ambassador of the brand’s purpose.
This is where business strategy and philosophy converge. If the interface is the new territory of loyalty, humanoid robotics represents the pinnacle of experiential branding. Empathy is no longer evoked through advertising narratives; it is experienced live through the warmth of a fluid interaction, the respect of a measured gesture, and the technology’s ability to anticipate a human need without being intrusive. Brands that understand this will stop selling products and start designing companions on the human journey.
A vision for the future and the symbiosis between carbon and silicon
Looking ahead to the next decade, the global expansion of these technologies from the nerve centers of production to Western markets will completely reshape the economic and social fabric:
The radical redefinition of work and service. The massive arrival of robotic agents on the front lines of customer service is not about replacing humanity, but about liberating it from mechanical redundancy. When the machine takes over the operational tasks, the person retains what is indispensable: strategy, connection, creativity, and caring for others. The big question organizations must answer is not how many robots to incorporate, but what humans will do with the time the robots give them back. And there is a second, even more uncomfortable question: the labor shortage and rising labor costs, especially in Europe, are already—according to market research—one of the main drivers of this adoption. It is not just innovation by choice; in many sectors, it is beginning to be replacement by necessity.
The erosion of cultural boundaries. The mass export of this type of technology foreshadows a global ecosystem where standards for smart assistance, automated hospitality, and urban comfort will become homogenized. With humanoid robots rolling off the assembly line at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts, the pace of this homogenization will be faster than almost any industry projection today anticipates. Global brands will no longer export only physical goods, but standardized behaviors and forms of interaction that will shape urban daily life on a planetary scale.
The humanist imperative. The more advanced technology becomes, the more necessary it is to protect what makes us unique. The great danger is not that machines will think like us, but that we will begin to relate to the coldness of machines. The ambition behind advanced robotics should not be to clone life, but to enhance our capacity for wonder and well-being.
The risk is not that the machine will resemble us
Here I want to pause, because it’s the heart of everything I’ve been writing for years about human brands in digital worlds. The danger was never that a machine would learn to behave like a person. The real risk is that we humans will start behaving like machines : efficient, cold, predictable, devoid of wonder.
A brand—and a civilization—is measured by its ability to preserve what cannot be automated: genuine empathy, endearing imperfection, the capacity for wonder. If technology advances and we fail to cultivate this human dimension, we will have gained efficiency and lost meaning. And no brand survives for long without meaning.
Towards an enhanced humanism
The transformation we observe in Eastern assembly lines is not the victory of silicon over flesh, but rather the pursuit of a more mature symbiosis. Ultimately, robots learning to walk, intelligences leaving the safe haven of servers to leap into the physical world, and brands redefining their identity in three dimensions are nothing more than a reflection of our own evolutionary drive.
The true challenge of our time is not to stem the tide of technology, but to imbue it with a soul. To ensure that, in this definitive transition where artificial intelligence is finally learning to move atoms, our industries, our cities, and our lives continue to pulse with a profoundly human purpose.
In Wuhu, where thirty years ago steel was tempered for engines, today the future of human-machine interaction is being packaged for sixty countries. The question for each brand isn’t whether to get on board. It’s what story they’ll tell when it arrives.
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