Canberra cafe owner Sam Vekiriya has welcomed an autonomous robot waiter to his team after months of desperately searching for new staff.
The robot delivers food and drinks to tables and returns dirty dishes back to the kitchen when they're finished with, patiently stopping when patrons pass by.
After renting the robot for a trial period, he said he would be buying it for an up-front cost of about $30,000.
He said it was well worth the investment.
"It is worth that cost … for the customer prospect, they get faster service, you can utilise your staff to just focus on customer service rather than clearing tables."
Mr Vekiriya said the decision to buy a robot worker was fuelled by ongoing worker shortages, adding that the novelty factor was a nice bonus.
"We've been looking for staff for a year and a half, and really badly, desperately looking for staff for the last three months, which is really impossible to find at the moment," he said.
"Everyone is really grateful, it's good to have [the robot] for fun and entertainment, and then less load for the staff, which they understand, everyone is really supporting that."
But he added that the latest hire would not be taking anyone's job anytime soon.
Are robot waiters really that revolutionary?
The use of robot workers in hospitality is only the tip of the automation iceberg.
Andrew Aston is the director of Melbourne-based robotics consultancy Quantum Robotics.
The company implements a host of automated robots for use in warehouses, inventory, retail and hospitality businesses.
These machines run the gamut from forklifts, palletising arms and commercial cleaning robots in addition to smaller hospitality and retail assistants.
He said the use of hospitality robots was unlikely to lessen the need for human staff, despite their obvious novelty.
"Do they really offer an opportunity to reduce your staff headcount? Probably not," he said.
"So the return on investment that businesses typically look for isn't there, but as a marketing tool, certainly they've been very popular."
Where robots are experiencing a much more significant growth is in what Mr Aston calls "the three Ds".
"Dull work that's repetitive or routine that has low productivity, the implementation of robotics has accelerated off the back of COVID, and it's continued now that [COVID has] sort of subsided, it's still booming."
The International Federation of Robots 2021 Service Robots report found the pandemic boosted robot worker uptake most in the transport and logistics sector, trailed by the cleaning and medical support industries.
The same report found hospitality robot sales didn't increase significantly during the same period, likely due to businesses being shuttered in the early days of the pandemic.
What do workers' unions say about it?
The rising tides of automation are nothing new to the unions that represent millions of Australian workers.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions represents about 1.8 million Australian workers.
Secretary Sally McManus said in a statement to the ABC that automation was far from a new phenomenon in many workplaces, but that robots would only be welcome in the workplace as a mechanism of improving the quality of life and safety of workers.
"It is critical that working people be at the centre of how automation is rolled out through workplaces and industries, to ensure that automation creates safer workplaces and strengthens the rights, wages and conditions of working people, rather than undermining them."
In a statement to the ABC, Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union national president Andrew Dettmer added that robots had been part of Australian manufacturing for decades, and that robots would be adopted into more workplaces so long as people are put first.
"Putting workers at the centre of increasing technological advancement can help us create large scale employment opportunities in high-skilled, high-paid jobs, where workers have a high level of autonomy over the work they perform," he said.
