Quick answer: Probably not. Andrew Babkin spent most of September in China and came back a little upset, because so much there simply works better than at home. Hotel robots. QR codes for everything. Malls that stretch for kilometers, car showrooms that look like spaceships, parks kept to a standard he doesn’t see at home. From Shanghai’s Pudong airport, the maglev covers 30 km in about 8 minutes at 300 km/h and runs every 15–20 minutes; add a 10-minute taxi and you’re there. A taxi the whole way took him around an hour and a half. None of it is a breakthrough on its own. Put together, it feels like the next decade, while we are still discussing it. So he looked at our own industry, and at Azati too, and asked the uncomfortable question in the title.
The shallow lesson: they have robots, we need robots
The robots are the photo. They aren’t the reason it works.
The real lesson: the advantage is many ordinary things that all work at once
Cafés are everywhere and there’s always a free table. His best explanation is efficiency: costs are low enough that a café doesn’t need to be full to make money. Speed here is an operating habit, not a single invention you can import.
The sobering part
Nothing he saw needs technology we don’t have. The gap is execution, and execution is the part a company can’t blame on the market.
Full disclosure: this is one person’s month, and Andrew says so himself: he saw one hospital and won’t generalize from it. Azati builds software for a living, so “are we fast enough” is a question about us before it’s about anyone else. See our engineering work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Andrew Babkin, Managing Director & CTO at Azati, Forbes Technology Council member – read the original.
