Walk into a big UK distribution centre today and there's a decent chance you'll share the floor with a squat, waist-high robot that's never met a human boss. According to a BBC News investigation into Chinese robotics manufacturer Geek+, more than 2,000 of the firm's autonomous mobile robots are now working across ten British warehouse sites, deployed through UK partner MotionTech for retailers including Tesco, Asda and Next. Britain has become Geek+'s biggest market in Europe.
How big is this getting? Hard to say precisely. Commercial estimates for "UK warehouse automation" swing wildly depending on what's counted: one industry analysis by IMARC Group puts the market at roughly $2.4 billion in 2025, while other research providers cover the same year with a far bigger number by drawing the category more broadly. The disagreement is itself a useful data point for underwriters: this is too new a category for the market to have settled on a shared view of its scale, let alone its claims history.
What's driving the growth isn't in doubt. A decade of weak productivity and a persistent labour shortage have made automation an easy sell to retailers, and Geek+'s robots need no fixed conveyors or permanent infrastructure - just a QR-coded floor and some safety fencing - so they can be installed and moved almost as easily as they arrived. "Customers want fast deployable solutions," MotionTech account director Barry Pemberton told the BBC, describing a setup that lets retailers add storage density and picking speed without expanding their footprint or headcount.
For insurers and brokers, whether the robots work isn't really the interesting question. What matters is what happens to risk once thousands of them share floor space with warehouse staff, move racks that weigh more than a small car, and increasingly run on cameras and AI rather than a simple laser trip-wire.
A recent roundtable convened by The Entrepreneurs Network, bringing together robotics founders and the government's Regulatory Innovation Office, found that insurance rather than regulation is becoming one of the biggest brakes on how fast warehouse automation can scale in the UK.
The problem is specific and a bit strange. Almost every mobile warehouse robot on the market relies on the same basic lidar sensor - a laser that stops the machine dead the moment something crosses a fixed distance. It's a blunt tool, but insurers and certifiers understand it, so it's easy to price. Vision-based systems that use cameras and AI to judge distance and behaviour are often far more capable, but their decision-making is probabilistic rather than fixed, so they don't fit existing safety certification frameworks. Founders at the roundtable said customers were blunt about the result: no laser, no cover. One participant said the regulation, and the insurance market sitting behind it, effectively discourages firms from doing anything at all.
That's a live underwriting question for any UK insurer with exposure to logistics, manufacturing or retail distribution, and the kind of grey area that tends to end up in a coverage dispute rather than a clean claim.
It's already playing out at the small end of the market. A BIBA case study describes Alex Blackett, founder of a small UK robotics automation firm working with large factories, being turned down by mainstream providers before finally getting cover through a specialist broker via BIBA's Find Insurance Service. Blackett said proper liability cover was "a must-have to get the right liability insurance in place" before he could win factory work - and that some insurers couldn't offer it at all, apparently for lack of familiarity with large automated robots. Multiply that single supplier by the hundreds of integrators, software firms and end-users now sitting behind Britain's warehouse robot fleets, and the capacity gap starts to look like a commercial opportunity for insurers willing to build the expertise.
Warehouse keepers' liability and employers' liability have never been simple in a sector where the injury rate already runs well above the average for other industries, according to warehouse-sector research from US insurance platform Magaya. Automation was meant to strip out some of the repetitive-strain and manual-handling claims behind that toll, and in places it has. But it has also introduced a messier question: when a robot and a human collide, whose failure caused it? Could be the employer, for how staff were trained to work alongside the fleet. Could be a fault in the robot's software, which may have been written in China and licensed to a UK integrator. Could be a maintenance contractor who missed something on a recent visit.
Each answer points to a different policy - public liability, product liability, professional indemnity or a technology errors-and-omissions wording. Insurance Business UK has previously reported on this same tension in AI-driven claims handling, where the industry is still working out where human accountability sits once a machine is making live decisions. As Crawford UK and Ireland president Paul Lofkin put it in that piece, talking about AI more broadly: "Insurance is a trust business. It's a people business."
There's a second exposure that has nothing to do with forklift-style bumps and bruises. Warehouse robots, particularly the vision-based and humanoid systems being trialled by Chinese manufacturers including Unitree, AgiBot and Geek+ itself, capture continuous video and spatial data about a facility's layout, stock and staff movements. Founders at the Entrepreneurs Network roundtable compared this to Chinese-made 3D printers, where manufacturing data has reportedly been copied back to the manufacturer, and warned the same thing could happen with robots working in sensitive commercial environments.
That concern moved from theoretical to geopolitical in late July 2026, when the US Federal Communications Commission announced it would ban imports of new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. The devices, the FCC argued "could create supply chain vulnerabilities" and cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure. FCC chairman Brendan Carr framed the move as an effort to "secure America's critical supply chains," while China's foreign ministry accused Washington of using national security as cover for protectionism.
The UK hasn't made an equivalent move, and the robots currently working in British warehouses are wheeled AMRs rather than the humanoid and quadruped machines named in the US ban. But the episode shows how quickly cyber and data-sovereignty concerns around Chinese-manufactured hardware have gone mainstream. UK cyber and tech E&O underwriters would do well to start asking clients what their robots are recording and where that data ends up.
For brokers and underwriters dealing with a client that's deploying, or considering, warehouse robotics, the evidence above points to a fairly consistent checklist.
None of this is a reason for UK insurers to steer clear of the sector. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has flagged Britain's low uptake of robotics as a drag on productivity that the government is trying to fix, and the Trades Union Congress, which represents close to six million workers, wants automation rolled out with proper retraining and worker input rather than resisted outright. That points to a fast-growing insured base with new exposures nobody's fully priced yet, which is exactly the kind of gap specialist robotics, cyber and tech-E&O underwriters exist to fill.
The brokers and insurers who move first will need to get comfortable asking some unfamiliar questions: what sensor is actually fitted, who owns the software making split-second movement decisions, where the robot's data is stored, and how liability is apportioned in a supply chain that now starts at a factory floor in Hefei. It's a long way from the fire, flood and theft cover that has underpinned warehouse insurance for decades. But for an industry that has spent years selling robots to insurers as a customer-service novelty, the robots insurers now need to worry about are the ones already moving pallets down the aisle.
Does standard warehouse insurance cover robots? Not automatically. Property, stock, employers' liability and public liability sections in a typical UK warehouse policy weren't written with autonomous mobile robots or humanoid systems in mind. Cover for the robots themselves, or for liability arising from their operation, often needs arranging separately or endorsing onto the policy, as the BIBA case study above shows.
Why is vision-based robot technology harder to insure than lidar-based systems? Lidar makes a simple, fixed-distance stop decision that's easy to certify and price. Vision-based AI systems make probabilistic judgement calls that don't fit neatly into existing safety certification frameworks, a gap flagged directly by founders at The Entrepreneurs Network's 2026 robotics roundtable.
Does the US ban on Chinese humanoid robots affect UK warehouses? Not directly. The fleets currently operating in British distribution centres, including Geek+'s, are wheeled AMRs rather than the humanoid and quadruped robots named in the FCC's ban, as reported by CBS News and Al Jazeera. It does signal that data-sovereignty and cybersecurity concerns around Chinese-made hardware are becoming a mainstream regulatory issue, one UK cyber and tech E&O underwriters should factor into their own risk assessments.
Who is liable if a warehouse robot injures a worker? It depends where the failure sits. Employer negligence, a software or hardware defect, and a maintenance failure by a third-party contractor each point to a different type of cover - employers' liability, product liability, professional indemnity or technology E&O. That's why clear records of who built, licensed and maintains the system matter more than they used to.
