CIJConnect Bot-enabled WhatsApp
Bots to Big Machines
At the Kinetiq RRobotics (Star Engineers India Pvt. Ltd) booth, the future quite literally looked back at you. Newly launched AI greeting robots stood at the entrance, ready with a cheerful “Hi” as visitors approached, their screens lighting up with multilingual responses and quick, fluid voice recognition. You could talk to them, ask them questions, even watch them process information in real time. Not far from them rolled a group of delivery robots, their tray shelves neatly stacked with cups, chips and chocolates, gliding through the crowd like friendly attendants.
The mix of warmth and automation at the stall made it one of the most striking examples of how robotics is being designed not just to work — but to engage, assist and coexist with people. As the company’s chief growth officer Anil Sathe summed it, “Rather than replacing people, these robots are meant to complement human labour by taking over repetitive, low-value tasks.”
The company’s immediate target segments include hospitality, corporate offices, pharma and food manufacturing (where human presence is restricted), warehousing and e-commerce fulfilment.
If the robotics pavilion revealed automation in motion, a short walk away the focus shifted to the quieter strength of smart engineering. Stas Chem Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a 40-year-old group rooted in chemical manufacturing, brought a different kind of innovation to the exhibition — BLACK, the company’s newly launched brand for cleaning tools and machinery.
The lineup included around 12 freshly introduced machines and three additional product lines, with multiple SKUs planned under each category. The new launches include single disk scrubbing and polishing machine, advanced vacuum cleaners and scrubber driers. “All machines are assembled in-house and all development labs, quality control processes and compliance certifications are maintained internally,” said Ayush Saxena, Director at Stas Group.
AI At Work
Amid the heavy-duty machines, the exhibition also revealed discoveries unfolding in a quieter digital space – like a digital map of India’s loos, stitched together through AI, rewards and a simple idea called World of Loo (WOLOO).
WOLOO stood out at the exhibition as a digital ecosystem built to solve one of India’s most persistent challenges – clean and reliable public sanitation, especially for women. Founded by Manish Kelshikar, the company’s journey began in 2019 with an intention to create safe, hygienic, women-friendly washrooms. “We started with building our own washrooms called the ‘women’s powder room’. The first of these spaces opened in Mumbai,” said senior manager Shreya Kumbhavdekar.
An Integrated System
For exhibitors and visitors navigating the complexities of housekeeping, laundry services, sanitation contracts, or multi-site maintenance, Zoho FSM (Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd)’s digital intervention was easily understood. Its core idea is simple: Bring every moving part of a service operation onto one integrated system.
As the team explained, many small and mid-sized cleaning businesses today still coordinate technicians through informal channels — mostly WhatsApp messages, scattered notes, and manual scheduling. “The result is predictable with missed slots, double-booked staff, delayed assignments, and no visibility into what is happening in the field. We fill this gap,” they said.
Built as a mobile-friendly, multilingual platform (available in Hindi and over 25 languages), Zoho FSM enables businesses to schedule, assign, track, invoice and close jobs from a single ecosystem. The platform supports both Android and iOS, with a web interface for back-end teams, making it accessible to operations of every scale.
One of its standout capabilities is intelligent dispatching — the system allows managers to assign technicians based on proximity, skill set, availability, and potential scheduling conflicts.
“On-the-ground staff can update job status, upload images, and collect customer feedback directly through the app, creating a complete record of every visit,” the team members explained.
According to the Zoho team, the steady footfalls not only brought leads and sign-ups, but rich conversations with cleaning businesses of all. Many visitors, they noted, were openly relieved to discover that such a platform existed, because they had long been juggling operations manually without realising a dedicated solution could streamline everything.
