Certis, one of Singapore's largest security and integrated facilities management companies, has entered a commercial partnership with IntBot to deploy social humanoid robots across its managed properties in Singapore. As reported by BriefGlance, the robots will take on concierge and security support roles — greeting visitors, managing access queries, providing directional guidance, and augmenting human security personnel during both peak and low-traffic hours. The deployment moves Certis from conventional wheeled patrol robots into a qualitatively different category of human-facing machine.
Certis manages a substantial portfolio of security and facilities contracts across Singapore's commercial, government, transport, and healthcare infrastructure. The IntBot partnership gives Certis a humanoid deployment capability that its conventional fleet does not provide: natural language interaction, social presence, and adaptive visitor engagement that traditional wheeled service robots are not designed to deliver. IntBot's platform is built with an anthropomorphic upper body and expressive visual elements that research consistently shows put human visitors more at ease than purely functional robot designs.
Social Humanoid Robots: A New Commercial Category
Social humanoid robots occupy a distinct niche from the industrial humanoid platforms making headlines in automotive manufacturing. These systems are designed primarily for human-facing interaction rather than physical manipulation of heavy objects — they prioritize natural language processing, social cue recognition, and safe navigation in human-dense environments. Their form factor — upright, bipedal or at least torso-present — is a deliberate design choice: humans respond differently to robot shapes that resemble people, and for service applications this response matters for adoption rates and visitor satisfaction scores.
Why This Deployment Matters for APAC Service Sectors
The Certis–IntBot deployment is significant for the regional facilities management industry because Certis is not a technology startup running a proof-of-concept — it is a large-scale commercial operator with multi-year contracts across sensitive public and government venues where operational reliability is non-negotiable. A successful deployment at this institutional scale would provide a reference case that other major facilities management companies across APAC could act on with reduced perceived risk. Singapore's regulatory environment, with clear frameworks for autonomous systems in public spaces, makes it the natural proving ground for this category in the region.
For IntBot, the Certis partnership provides an anchor customer with a deployment pipeline that most humanoid startups cannot access independently. The security and facilities sector represents a large addressable commercial market — global contract security revenues exceed $300 billion annually — and humanoid robots that can credibly augment human guard and concierge staff address a genuine labor-cost and availability challenge that major operators across the region are actively seeking to resolve. Success in Singapore gives IntBot a reference deployment it can take to other APAC markets.