AgiBot humanoid answers 46,686 questions at a Beijing hospital desk

In a busy hospital lobby, the questions never stop: which department do I need, how does my visit work, what does my insurance cover? At the outpatient guidance desk of Peking University People's Hospital in Beijing, a robot now takes a share of them. It is AgiBot's Lingxi X2, a half-size humanoid built for settings where people talk to it face to face. It answers with a human-like voice and gestures, and it has become a regular presence at the desk.

Behind the voice is the AI medical assistant of Ant Group's Afu app, running on Ant Group's medical large model. The robot is also connected to the hospital's private knowledge base, so its answers draw on the hospital's own information rather than generic replies. Its remit is narrow: it directs patients to the right department, explains visit procedures, answers questions on medical insurance policy and gives in-hospital directions. It does not diagnose or treat. It supports front-desk staff on basic inquiries.

According to the companies, the robot had worked 66 working days at the desk up to September 30 and completed 46,686 interactions, roughly 707 a day, with a single-day peak of 1,420. These are operational figures the companies published themselves, not measurements by an outside party, and the disclosure does not compare them with what human staff handle over the same period.

The deployment extends AgiBot's push into public-facing service roles, following recent campus and theme park programs. For Afu, it moves Ant Group's medical assistant from a phone screen to a physical presence at the point where patients first arrive.

For hospital staff, the gain is in the repetitive part of the job: the questions that usually pile up on guidance staff go to the robot. For patients, it means a quick answer that stays consistent from one visitor to the next. The companies' stated goal is a model that can be replicated and rolled out at scale, but the sources give no timeline, no number of sites and no price. For now this is one desk in one Beijing hospital, and the next step is to show the model works elsewhere.