From baking pizza to getting express delivery, the robots running around are finally coming to your home

What kind of work did the hottest WAIC in history do? It is enough to read this article. Text | Anita Deng, Zhou Xinyu, Wang Xinyi, Wen Lihong, Editor | Zhang Yuxin. If you want to know how popular this year's number one event in the AI circle is, just come to Shanghai and feel the high temperature approaching 40 degrees, and you will be able to resonate with the same frequency. Not very hot, just hotter. On July 17, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference officially opened at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center. The exhibition area exceeded 100,000 square meters for the first time, with more than 1,100 companies participating, more than 3,000 exhibits on display, and more than 300 products making their global debut. Judging from the number of exhibitors, compared with 400 in 2023 and 800 in 2025 - it has more than doubled in two years. Judging from the news spread online, tickets for this year's WAIC are sold out earlier than before - a single-day ticket originally priced at 168 yuan has been sold to nearly ten times the price by scalpers, and a three-day pass has been sold for 3,000 yuan. The forum lineup is also more luxurious than before. Nine Turing Award and Nobel Prize winners attended this WAIC conference. Richard Sutton, the father of reinforcement learning, and Joshua Bengio, one of the three giants of deep learning, were all present. Following the dozens of large models vying for the limelight in 2023, the application explosion in 2024, and the explosion of embodiment in 2025, WAIC in 2026 can be said to have truly blossomed - the diversity of exhibits is far greater than before, with more than 108 chips, 261 large models, and 208 embodied smart terminals all unveiled at this exhibition. If in the past WAIC was still asking "Can models and embodiments work?", then the answer in 2026 is already clear: no need to ask more, using AI is the serious thing. From AI mobile phones, to robots running around collecting express delivery, making pizza, and hand-grinding coffee, to countless Agents... All AI companies are answering the same proposition: How does AI start to really work? AI is no longer a concept in PPT, it will be your colleague, your assistant, and your partner in life. As usual, the editorial department of "Intelligent Emergence" continues to visit the World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center to bring you this 2026 WAIC exploration report. the following