Japanese robot Pepper is getting an intelligence upgrade via IBM’s Watson, but that doesn’t make interacting with the real world any less challenging.

The humanoid will channel Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge base when it starts work as a sales clerk next year at Yamada Denki, a major electronics retailer.

Pepper has helped sell goods such as smartphones and coffee machines before, but engineers hope Watson’s ability to suggest relevant information will lead to richer interactions with customers. The robot can be programmed with a specific goal in mind—to move stock out the door.

Laden with sensors, the cloud-connected Pepper has been marketed as a communication robot with a feel-good vibe and penchant for jokes, but developers are trying to make it more useful. One problem is the bottlenecks inherent in “embodying” the Watson AI platform and its natural-language processing powers in the real world via a robot like Pepper.

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