On September 10, China Media Group hosted a CCTV Finance event during the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai.
The event opened with KEENON humanoid robots performing Cyber Stage alongside professional dancers. Combining advanced robotics with traditional Chinese aesthetics, the performance demonstrated the robots’ motion control and multi-robot coordination capabilities.
Li Tong, Founder and CEO of KEENON Robotics, participated in the opening ceremony and joined a high-level dialogue with Xing Zhao of Tsinghua University and Galbot, Hongyang Li of the University of Hong Kong, Ziwei Liu of Nanyang Technological University, and Tian Qin of ZhenFund.
Balancing Technology and Business from the Start
The discussion addressed key issues surrounding embodied intelligence, including technical barriers, access to high-quality training data, long-term investment, commercialization, and responsible development.
Li emphasized that technological progress must be supported by commercial sustainability.
“Embodied intelligence companies need patient capital because research and development require long-term investment,” Li said. “At the same time, companies cannot focus only on technology. They must connect technology with real business applications and generate sustainable returns. Commercialization must be considered from the very beginning.”
This balance between technological innovation and business value is central to KEENON’s strategy.
On the technology side, KEENON has developed KOM 3.0, a vision-language-action architecture for service environments that integrates a latent-space world model. It enables robots to evaluate potential outcomes before executing actions, helping improve task stability.
On the business side, KEENON follows a role-based approach to commercialization. Complex environments such as hotels, restaurants, and retail stores are divided into clearly defined roles, including reception, delivery, and cleaning. Robots can then be deployed in specific positions, providing operational insights that support continuous improvement.
Safety as the Foundation of Global Deployment
Li also highlighted safety and compliance as essential to the global development of embodied intelligence. As robot deployments scale, companies must ensure that their products can operate safely and reliably in real-world environments.
KEENON maintains regionally deployed data infrastructure and works to meet applicable security, privacy, and regulatory requirements across its markets.
Looking ahead, Li said the industry should take an objective view of AI—neither overestimating nor underestimating its capabilities—while remaining focused on practical and responsible innovation.
Through its “general-purpose + specialized” strategy, KEENON is working to move robots beyond demonstrations and into practical service roles. Its appearance at the event also showcased the growing collaboration among China-developed robotics, AI music, and computing technologies.
Published: 2026-09-19
