Robotic bartenders and smart hotels: Alibaba’s vision of future consumption

It was half-past midnight on November 12, and Alibaba Group Holding had just announced a record-breaking US$30.8 billion in e-commerce purchases for Singles’ Day 2018. Instead of joining the steady stream of reporters filing out of the media centre to return to their hotels, I was standing in front of a robotic arm that was twisting itself from side-to-side as it prepared the cocktail I just ordered.

I had scrolled through a list of drinks available via a mobile menu – which included a gin and tonic and a hot toddy – and settled on a lychee martini because the (human) bartender manning the exhibit said it was the drink the robotic arm had prepared for Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder and executive chairman, about an hour ago. If a lychee martini was good enough for China’s richest man, it was good enough for me.

“Jack Ma did not drink the martini … but [Alibaba chief executive] Daniel Zhang had a pandan latte,” the same employee told me, after explaining that the robot doubles as a mixologist and a barista to create alcoholic concoctions and caffeinated beverages with ease and precision. If consumers want to customise their drinks they can do so on their smartphones and the machine will precisely adjust the proportion of alcohol to mixers in their cocktail or coffee.

The robotic arm, the brainchild of Shanghai-based start-up Ratio, was one of the many exhibits on display at “The Ideal Living” exhibition – a glimpse into what future living could look like if Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, had its way.

Ratio’s robotic arm takes orders via smartphone, where customers scan a QR code, select drinks off a menu and pay via mobile payments service Alipay. The start-up, which operates a physical store in Shanghai’s Raffles Place mall, uses Alibaba’s cloud services and its payments system to help facilitate customer orders, founder Gavin Pathross tells me.