In the summer of 2023, Atalia Lapkin was introduced to her newest coworker: a 300-pound autonomous robot named Moxi. Leadership at the Good Samaritan Hospital in the Seattle suburb of Puyallup had wheeled in the robot to cart around bloodwork, supplies, and medication while nurses cared for patients.

Right away, Lapkin, an ICU nurse, noticed Moxi was in trouble. It frequently lost its way in hospital corridors, cried for help when faced with elevator buttons, and ping-ponged before elevator doors, unable to discern which lift to take. If something blocked its charging spot, Moxi spun in circles. Eventually, Lapkin said, Moxi needed a handler to accompany it and help it navigate.

“Why do we have the robot if we have a human with her all the time?” Lapkin said. “It kind of became a running joke.”

Hospitals around the country are racing to implement AI and automation across a variety of tasks — ranging from clinical documentation to scheduling to patient management. Analysts estimated that last year alone $1.4 billion was spent on healthcare AI. 

Amid the deluge of products, Moxi may be the most embodied — an R2-D2-like can-on-wheels topped with a boxier, single-armed Stormtrooper. Since launching in 2019, nearly 100 Moxi robots have deployed to more than 25 hospital systems around the country and completed over 1.3 million tasks, according to its maker, Diligent Robotics. They plan to expand to more hospitals, and another fleet may soon be dispatched to senior living facilities.

But several nurses told Proof News hospital leadership ushered in the bots to address staffing challenges, only to be forced to pull the plug.

Good Samaritan is part of a 13-hospital system in Washington state run by MultiCare, which piloted Moxi across some of its facilities. The nation faces a critical nursing shortage, and Lapkin said the move followed Good Samaritan’s decision to leave beds unfilled because it lacked the staff to care for more patients. At the pilot's peak, 14 robots navigated five of its hospital corridors. 

But Moxi struggled to get around. Lapkin said that because Moxi got lost between floors, she and her colleagues did not use the bot to transport blood draws because they were concerned it wouldn’t reach the lab fast enough to be usable. They would have to discard the samples and run them again — delaying care for patients in critical condition. Other nurses echoed Lapkin’s experiences.

Good Samaritan ditched the robot in July 2024, and another hospital in the same system, Tacoma General, got rid of Moxi in August 2025. In March, the Washington State Nurses Association published an obituary for its nurses’ former battery-powered coworker.

“Moxi, a hospital robot who once worked at MultiCare hospitals, passed peacefully to the AI beyond,” Bobbi Nodell, marketing and communications manager, wrote. “Rest in peace.” 

In an emailed statement, Andrea Thomaz, co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics, told Proof that MultiCare was an important early partner that helped them “refine elevator integration” and other deployment issues. 

“Building robotics that operate safely and reliably in busy human environments is one of the most technically challenging problems in AI and robotics, and those early deployments played an important role in advancing the technology,” Thomaz said in a statement.

In an emailed statement, MultiCare’s spokesperson Scott Thompson wrote that the Moxi pilot was an example of the company regularly exploring “new technologies and innovative approaches that have the potential to improve efficiency and allow our caregivers to spend more time with patients.”

“We learned a great deal during the deployment period — including what worked well and where adjustments were needed,” Thompson said. 

EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD

Researchers have puzzled over how to build robots capable of autonomously navigating the world, where the occupants and their stuff tend to move around. The dawn of artificial intelligence opened the opportunity to program a robot to adapt to its environment and formulate its next steps independently.  

Thomaz and her co-founder, Vivian Chu, spent several years in academia researching AI and social robotics, the training of robots to interact with humans. They founded Diligent Robotics in 2017 on the idea that robots could be programmed to manage busy hallways and be “socially intelligent” in responding to human requests.

They started with three female engineers on their team and a robotic arm prototype, eventually creating a full-fledged robot, Moxi. The founders make it clear in their pitch that Moxi should not replace nurses, but assist them.

The Austin-based company eventually raised over $100 million in funds from investors and leaned into the “robot-as-a-service” model, where hospitals pay a recurring fee to use Moxi. Each hospital is expected to generate $200,000 to $400,000 in annual revenue, according to Serve Robotics, the autonomous robots food delivery company that acquired Diligent for $29 million in January. 

We reached out to 14 hospitals that deployed Moxi, and five of them confirmed they are still running the program. The rest didn’t respond.

During an earnings call in March, Serve CEO Ali Kashani said that the acquisition of Diligent will help the company collect more indoor navigation data, which can feed their “robotics and autonomy” platform and make their navigation models better.   

Ross Koppel, a professor of medical informatics at the University of Pennsylvania with expertise in healthcare innovation and cost-effectiveness, said that he understands the appeal of robots like Moxi given the pressures that hospitals face, working on tiny margins.

“Of course cost is a factor, but so is the fact that there is a massive shortage of nurses,” Koppel said via email. But for a robot to be helpful, “the configuration of the hospital is relevant. Many hospitals are a tapestry of buildings that are linked with long hallways, elevators, and stairs. The robots need to work harder in such settings.” 

Plus, Koppel said robots cannot do critical observational work that a nurse walking in the hallway can: see a patient struggling, hear someone gasping, or notice a dangerous reading on a monitor.

Standing 5 feet tall, Moxi has artificial intelligence embedded in its software to adapt to a new hospital. Its LED eyes are designed to make it appear friendly, and it can respond to requests through a speaker on its face. Staff can tuck supplies in its storage compartments, and the bot’s arm is programmed to handle doors and elevators. In 2024, the company boasted that Moxi had completed over 100,000 autonomous elevator rides. 

Stephanie Jesso, an assistant professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton University, examined Reddit posts about the bot and found all 19 users who professed direct experiences with Moxi felt negatively about it. Jesso believes that Moxi “missed the mark” on helping nurses reduce burnout or assisting them to do their job better “because of inherent complexities within the space of healthcare.”

“The state of robot sensory perception and motor capabilities is just in their infancy in terms of capabilities and nothing like human level abilities,” said Jesso. “Lab environments are fundamentally controlled, and the real world is not. And healthcare, specifically, is a really complex, open, and unpredictable environment that robots just can't perform well in at the moment.”

In her statement, Thomaz said Diligent Robotics “maintained an extended onsite engineering presence” at MultiCare’s hospitals “so our team could iterate quickly on what we were learning in real hospital conditions.” She added they “look forward to opportunities to re-engage as our next-generation platform comes to market.”

Laurel Riek, a professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego who studies human-robot interaction, said that with healthcare workers being burned out, constantly interrupted, and assigned ancillary tasks, there’s an appeal to offload work onto robots. But inevitably, she said, workers end up babysitting the automated agent.

“For example, they may need to charge its batteries or help it when it gets stuck,” Riek said via email.

Riek, who made a career of robotics working on designing new telepresence robots, where people control a robot remotely, and co-designing bedside robots, believes robots can be helpful in hospital settings. But she said her first recommendation to hospitals trying to improve operations is to focus on people.

“The best way for healthcare leaders to do this is to assign nurses less work, fairly compensate them, and provide adequate staffing,” Riek said.

MORE ROBOTS, MORE PROBLEMS 

About a dozen miles northwest of Good Samaritan, nurses at another MultiCare hospital, Tacoma General, similarly bemoaned Moxi. One remembers the time when her colleague was “boxed in” by Moxi in an elevator.

“The elevator was going up a couple floors, and Moxi got on after her and kind of wedged her into a corner, and she couldn't get out,” said the nurse, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from her employer. “So she had to go all the way up to where Moxi was getting off, have Moxi get off, and then go back down.”

Nurses from both Tacoma and Good Samaritan said their hospitals were already outfitted with a pneumatic tube system to transport things across floors – a technology developed at least 150 years ago. 

“We already have a way to ferry something back and forth,” said Lapkin. “Moxi didn't make sense.” 

In response, Thomaz said that pneumatic tubes address a different need. “Tubes move small, time-sensitive items between fixed endpoints, while Moxi handles bulkier, multi-stop, and consolidated deliveries that tubes can't accommodate,” she said. 

Ruth Gelbach, another nurse from Good Samaritan, said the robot showed up amid contract negotiations. Nurses complained that they were overworked and hadn’t been able to take breaks, asking their employer to hire “break nurses” to lighten the load. 

“They introduced this robot that was supposed to help us, but we knew it cost a lot of money,” said Gelbach. “It was like saying the robots were worth spending money on; the nurses weren't.”  

When asked about Gelbach’s comments, Thompson, MultiCare’s spokesperson, said Moxi was brought in to “support our nurses.” 

With little use for Moxi, many nurses found ways to entertain themselves. Moxi rolled around in a wig and dress-up clothes, ferrying snacks. They considered making Moxi wear the union T-shirt. 

“I'm not gonna lie when I say this: We used Moxi to send candy to other floors more often than we did anything else with Moxi,” said another Good Samaritan nurse who declined to give their name because they did not have permission from their employer to speak publicly. 

Ultimately, management cut the cord. 

“Utilization of the robots was not extensive,” read an email sent by the management at Tacoma General in August 2025. By the time workers received this email, the nurses Proof spoke to had almost completely abandoned the bot. 

The chiding obituary was published months later. “In lieu of flowers, nurses suggest investments in safe staffing, better working conditions, and the human care that patients depend on.”