In 2023, MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Washington, purchased 14 Moxi robots—five-foot, 300-pound autonomous machines with blinking blue eyes that turned heart-shaped when greeting people—and deployed them across its hospitals to deliver supplies, transport lab samples, and collect soiled linens. The idea was straightforward: nurses spend up to 30 percent of their time on non-value-added tasks, and a robot that handles the fetching and carrying gives that time back for patient care. By early 2025, MultiCare pulled the plug. Nurses described the robots as “annoying” and said they “got in the way.” Hospital administration said the program didn’t make financial sense. Moxi, the robot that was supposed to help solve the nursing shortage, passed peacefully to what the Washington State Nurses Association called “the AI beyond.”
Meanwhile, at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, three Moxi robots are operating across neurology, orthopedic, and surgical units, and the nursing staff describes them with genuine affection. Nearly 100 Moxi robots currently operate across more than 25 hospital facilities nationwide. Diligent Robotics, Moxi’s creator, was acquired by Serve Robotics in January 2026 and unveiled Moxi 2.0 in October 2025—a next-generation platform with ten times the compute power, built on 1.25 million deliveries of proprietary real-world data. Foxconn’s Nurabot, built with Kawasaki hardware and NVIDIA AI infrastructure, is being piloted in Taiwan and is slated for commercial launch in early 2026, with early results showing a 20 to 30 percent reduction in daily nursing workload. Changi General Hospital in Singapore has more than 80 robots assisting doctors and nurses with everything from administrative work to medication delivery.
The Moxi story contains both realities simultaneously: in one hospital system, the robot was a $1.5-million failure that nurses wanted gone. In another, it’s a beloved teammate that staff say makes their shifts better. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s implementation, workflow integration, hospital layout, staffing culture, and whether the robot was solving a problem the nurses actually had.
The shortage the robots are supposed to address
The U.S. nursing shortage is not speculative. It’s structural, worsening, and quantified in detail. An estimated 200,000 to 450,000 nursing positions are currently vacant. Over 6.5 million healthcare professionals may exit the workforce by 2026, creating a projected shortfall of more than 4 million workers across physicians, nurses, and support staff. In 2024, national RN turnover ran at approximately 16 percent, with more than 287,000 staff RNs leaving their positions and hospitals hiring roughly 385,000 to backfill and grow. Nearly one million registered nurses are over 50, signaling a massive retirement wave. Between 2024 and 2025, more than 65,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing programs due to faculty shortages, limited clinical sites, and budget constraints.
The pipeline is fragile, demand is surging (five of the 20 fastest-growing occupations in the latest BLS statistics are nursing roles), and the burnout driving the exits is self-reinforcing—fewer nurses means higher patient ratios, which means more burnout, which means more exits. One hundred thousand nurses left the profession during the pandemic alone. The nursing shortage is not a problem that can be solved by hiring faster. There aren’t enough nurses being produced, and the ones who exist are leaving.
This is the context in which robots enter the conversation. Not as a replacement for nurses—no serious roboticist or hospital administrator frames it that way—but as a tool to reduce the non-clinical workload that burns nurses out and pushes them toward the exit.
What robots actually do in hospitals right now
The taxonomy of healthcare robots in 2026 is broader than most people realize, and the category “nurse robot” is mostly a media invention. Robots in hospitals today fall into distinct functional classes, and understanding what each does—and doesn’t do—is essential to answering the replacement question.
Logistics and delivery robots, like Moxi and Nurabot, transport medications, lab specimens, linens, and supplies between departments. They navigate hallways, operate elevators, avoid obstacles, and complete deliveries autonomously. They do not touch patients. They do not make clinical decisions. They are, functionally, autonomous supply carts with better navigation software and the emotional intelligence to wave hello in the hallway. The value proposition is time savings on the walking-and-fetching that consumes a third of a nurse’s shift.
Surgical robots are the most established category and the least relevant to the nursing question. The da Vinci Surgical System has been in use for over two decades, and roughly three out of four prostate cancer surgeries in the U.S. are now performed using it. But da Vinci doesn’t replace surgeons—it extends their precision. A surgeon operates the robot’s arms through a console. The robot doesn’t make decisions about incision placement or tissue handling. It’s a tool that makes the surgeon more accurate, not a replacement that makes the surgeon unnecessary.
Pharmacy automation systems dispense, sort, and track medications with higher accuracy than manual processes. These are well-established, relatively uncontroversial, and meaningfully reduce medication errors—one of the leading causes of preventable hospital deaths.
Companion and therapeutic robots occupy a small but growing niche. Paro, a therapeutic baby harp seal robot developed in Japan, is used in hospitals and nursing homes to provide emotional support for dementia patients. In Scotland, the National Robotarium trialed an ARI robot to assist patients with rehabilitation exercises, addressing physiotherapist shortages. Japan’s AIREC humanoid can reposition patients, cook, and do laundry in aged-care settings—addressing a demographic crisis where the elderly population is growing faster than the workforce that cares for them.
Disinfection robots became ubiquitous during the pandemic, using UV-C light to sterilize rooms between patients. Telepresence robots allow remote physicians to “visit” patients via a screen-on-wheels, expanding specialist access in rural hospitals.
What robots cannot do
The list is long, and it maps almost perfectly onto the things that make nursing a profession rather than a job.
Clinical assessment—the ability to look at a patient and recognize that something is wrong before the vitals confirm it. The pattern recognition that comes from thousands of patient interactions. The judgment call about whether a change in a patient’s behavior warrants a page to the physician or a note in the chart. The capacity to hold a dying patient’s hand and know when to stop talking and when to say something. The ability to advocate for a patient who can’t advocate for themselves—to push back on a physician’s order, to escalate a concern, to notice the subtle signs of abuse or neglect or depression that don’t appear in any data stream a robot can access.
Nursing is a knowledge profession built on a foundation of physical tasks, and the physical tasks are the part robots can help with. The knowledge, judgment, empathy, and advocacy are the part they can’t. The Washington State Nurses Association, in its statement about Moxi’s discontinuation at MultiCare, put it simply: “Nurses are, and will always be, MultiCare’s most critical resource.”
The honest market
The global medical robotics market was valued at roughly $19 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $74 billion by 2034—a 16 percent compound annual growth rate. The smart hospital sector hit $72 billion in 2025. Diligent Robotics expects to double its hospital footprint annually and deploy thousands of Moxi units by 2030. These numbers are real. The investment is substantial. The trajectory is clearly toward more robots in more hospitals doing more tasks.
But the trajectory is also clearly toward robots as teammates, not replacements. Moxi 2.0’s roadmap includes expansion into senior living facilities, where the robot would greet residents by name, remember their preferences, and eventually hold basic conversations. The co-founder of Diligent Robotics describes the goal as “combining useful help with genuine human connection”—which is either a touching aspiration or a fundamental misunderstanding of what human connection actually is, depending on your tolerance for Silicon Valley framing of emotional labor as an engineering problem.
The realistic near-term future is hybrid: robots handling logistics, pharmacy automation, disinfection, supply transport, and basic monitoring, while nurses handle everything that requires judgment, assessment, empathy, advocacy, and the irreplaceable capacity to be a human being in a room with another human being who is scared, in pain, or dying. The question “can robots replace nurses?” has a definitive answer in 2026: no. The better question—can robots make nursing sustainable as a profession by absorbing the non-clinical workload that’s burning nurses out faster than schools can train new ones?—has a more interesting answer: maybe, if the implementation doesn’t end up like MultiCare, and if the investment goes into solving nurses’ actual problems rather than building photogenic machines that wave hello in the hallway.
We cover healthcare robotics alongside humanoid manufacturing, autonomous drones, and the full landscape of robots entering human workspaces across our Humanoid Robots & Drones course—including why the robot most likely to change your life won’t look anything like the ones in the movies.