Beijing’s Haidian District issued the city’s first food operating license for embodied AI robots this week, with state media outlet People’s Daily saying the license given to EncoSmart signals a major step for advanced AI technology that will soon be applied across the food industry. According to the report, the company plans to pilot such robots with China’s major restaurant chains by year-end as a part of accumulating application scenario data, though no specific brands were named. The two-year-old EncoSmart currently operates fried food services with its first-generation unmanned kiosk robot in the Haidian district of Beijing. [People’s Daily, in Chinese]