I tried a physical AI assistant at MWC 2026, and I'm not sure we need one

Lenovo turned up to MWC 2026 with its usual suitcase full of wild ideas, and while the ThinkBook Modular AI PC rightfully stole most of the spotlight, it wasn’t the only oddball on the stand. Staring at me among the concepts was something stranger — an AI-powered robotic arm with “Love me” eyes. No mouth, no smile, just a cute little stare following you around the desk.

This is Lenovo’s AI Workmate concept, and the best way I can describe it is as a physical AI assistant, the kind that normally lives inside your phone or laptop, but has now decided it wants its own space on a desk.

The idea is to give AI a body and let it help you with everyday office tasks, blending your physical and digital lives. The robot can scan and summarize documents placed in front of it, organizing notes, whip up presentations with voice prompts, and even project content directly onto a wall or nearby surface.

Talking to it feels familiar, like the pre-Google Gemini days when you could issue straightforward voice commands to get work done. But things get a bit uncomfortable when you realize it’s always watching. There’s a built-in camera that lets it recognize when a person is standing in front of it and even distinguish the primary user from others nearby.

One of the slicker moments in the demo was watching it intelligently scan the room, identify a blank wall, and decide that yes, this is a good place to project a presentation. You can also quite literally hand off content from your laptop using gestures. Drag a file in mid-air toward the robot, and it picks it up, projects it, and carries on as if that’s a totally normal thing to do in an office.

Another surprisingly clever trick was document signing. You sign a piece of paper in front of the robot, and it captures your signature and transfers it straight onto a digital document on your laptop. The same idea applies to hand-drawn sketches.

As fun as all of this was to watch, I couldn’t help but feel that the AI Workmate is solving problems we’ve already solved, just in a more theatrical way. Everything it does can already be done faster with the tools most of us carry every day, without the need for a robot arm silently staring at us from across the desk.

Still, that’s kind of the point of MWC. It’s a testing ground for ideas that are equal parts clever, weird, and impractical. And even if the AI Workmate never makes it out of concept-land, I’ll admit it was pretty cool.