Today, Breakwater Strategy released new national polling, conducted with YouGov (n=1,306 U.S. adults, July 13–14, 2026), on how Americans feel about robots potentially operating in the spaces people occupy every day.
We believe robots will be quickly moving into the home, the store aisle, and the checkout line. As these machines become an increasingly routine part of daily life, the critical question for the companies deploying them is how the public reacts when something inevitably triggers a headline. The polling points to a few key insights:
- Nearly half of US adults refuse an offer of free home cleaning that’s used to train robots. We asked Americans to imagine a company was offering to clean their home for free, while the data they collected would be anonymized and used to train robots that would eventually be able to clean homes without human involvement. 48% of Americans were unwilling to accept the free cleaning, compared to just 34% who were willing.
- Regardless of whether someone would accept the cleaning or not, Americans’ most common primary objection was focused on privacy and data use. Among concerns about the cleaning service, surveillance dominated: cameras capturing images of private space (25%) and data used in ways they never agreed to (23%) far outranked worries about data being sold to companies (7%) or the government (6%). The visceral reaction is to being observed at home, rather than downstream data economics.
- Comfort with robots falls as their work carries more direct consequence for the customer. Americans are most comfortable when robots operate in the background — 63% for stockroom work, 59% for cleaning floors and aisles, even with shoppers present. Comfort slips to the mid-to-high 40s as robots stock shelves or assist customers directly, and falls to 39% at self-checkout.
- Lower prices don’t override that discomfort around direct engagement. When asked to consider whether they would accept robots doing various roles at the grocery store if it lowered their grocery bill, a plurality of Americans accepted robots in every role, but acceptance ran notably higher for back-of-house robots (58%) than those engaging with customers directly by helping them in the aisles (46%). The gap held relatively consistent with savings on the table, showing that proximity discomfort isn’t something a price cut erases.
- Americans are more likely to worry about robots taking others’ jobs, rather than their own. About 74% are worried robots will take other people’s jobs in the next five years, while just less than a third of workers (31%) worry about a robot taking their own job. It’s a 40-plus-point gap between the fear people hold for jobs, robots, and society — which is high — and the fear they hold for their own jobs, which is much lower.
For a company weighing a robotics deployment, these are stakeholder concerns to take seriously. People are saying plainly that they grow more wary the closer a robot gets to engaging with them directly. They appear to be drawing new lines around what they consider to be private data. And, while people may not yet be worried about their own jobs, they are convinced that society as a whole will be impacted in a robotic future.
Addressing these concerns is essential work — in how robots are designed and deployed and, as important, in how companies communicate the choices they make about robots to the public and policymakers around them. We believe based on our experience in corporate reputation work that being proactive will be far more effective and efficient than being reactive to events, particularly adverse events later. The companies that take these stakeholder worries seriously soonest will earn greater permission from the public to experiment, which will pay dividends as society and business learn and work through how robots fit into our daily lives.
Read the full survey data below.
Methodology:
All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1,306 U.S. adults. Fieldwork was undertaken July 13–14, 2026. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all U.S. adults (aged 18+). Poll conducted by Breakwater Strategy/YouGov.
Media Contact:
Chelsea@breakwaterstrategy.com