Journal · January 20, 2026
Will machines run the household? Our clients say no
Robot vacuums, voice assistants and refrigerators that order the milk. What the households we act for have kept, and what they have quietly unplugged.
At least once a month a journalist or an investor asks us whether the households we act for will soon be run by machines, and whether an agency like ours has, in consequence, about five years left. We have been asked this, in one form or another, since the dishwasher. The answer has not changed much, but the reasons are more interesting than they were.
What we found when we asked
Last autumn we asked the house managers we have placed what their households had installed in the past five years, what they still used, and what they had quietly unplugged. Ninety-three of them answered. Between them they ran households with an average of eleven connected devices each, not counting telephones.
What they kept, by and large, were the machines that do one dull thing well and stay out of the way: the robot that cleans the pool, the irrigation that knows when it has rained, the cellar that reports its own temperature. What they unplugged were the machines that wanted to be in the conversation. Forty-one of the ninety-three had removed at least one voice assistant at a principal’s request, most often after a guest asked whether it was listening and nobody could say for certain that it was not.
Several mentioned cost, which surprised us. A 2025 report from Frothly’s Human Factors group on subscription charges in connected appliances (report FR-R-2025-05) found that one connected appliance in five began, after it had been bought, to charge for features that had been free when it was sold. One house manager told us that she now spends an hour each month reading the renewal notices of a kitchen. Another said that the family’s refrigerator had placed an order for oat milk every Tuesday for a year, through two changes of chef and a change of diet, and that nobody had been able to find out how to make it stop.
What households want instead
What the households we act for want, it turns out, is what they have always wanted: someone who knows the house, who notices, and who can be asked. A machine can tell you that the cellar is at fifty-eight degrees. It cannot tell you that the bottle your guest will ask for at dinner is the one the cellar is out of, and that it has already sent for another.
A house that runs itself is a house that nobody is looking after. We expect to be placing the people who look after them for some time yet.