Data centers around the world will soon have a lot more robot staff than they have today, and as a result will be significantly more efficient, a new report from Gartner claims. The market analysts say that by 2025, half of cloud data centers will deploy bots with AI and ML capabilities and will be 30% more efficient for it. While the promise of operational efficiency may be the driving force behind the growing interest in bots, it's actually the expanding gap between growing server and storage volumes at data centers and the number of capable works to manage them all, that motivates data center operators most. "The risk of doing nothing to address these shortcomings is significant for companies," explained Gartner research VP Sid Nag. "Data center operations will only increase in complexity as organizations move more diverse workloads to the cloud, and as the cloud becomes the platform for a combinatorial use of additional technologies such as edge and 5G, to name a few."

One hotel in Japan learned the hard way that robots are not always right for the job. Henn na Hotel in Tokyo is laying off half of its nearly 250 robots because they failed to do their automated tasks and humans had to intervene in their operations, the Wall Street Journal via Business Insider reported on Jan. 17. The hotel began employing robots in 2015 with the goal of becoming "the most efficient hotel in the world" and to respond to a worker shortage. Those laid off included Churi, a pink, egg-shaped virtual assistant assigned in each room, who could not keep up with the likes of Siri and Alexa. For instance, she failed to answer guests' questions on opening hours of local businesses.

Many of the unusual robots working at Japan's Henn na Hotel are now out of work. Humans worried about the robot revolution threatening their jobs can relax. Japan's Henn na Hotel prided itself on its all-robot staff, but it turns out they weren't up to the job. Henn na's robot staff was first employed in 2015 with the aim of becoming "the most efficient hotel in the world." But four years later, it seems that the 243 robots are less of a novelty and more of a nuisance.