On-site Coverage of IFA 2026 | Don't Talk About Embodiment and AI, Europe Does Not Believe in "Black Tech"

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hard Krypton", authored by Huang Nan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.

Author | Huang Nan

Editor | Yuan Silai

In September 2026, the early autumn of Berlin is soaked in rain. The gray building complex of the exhibition center unfolds quietly in the morning light, like a precision device that has just been started. In this city that advocates "engineer culture", people are accustomed to measuring everything with a sense of certainty and process.

People who want to see unusual products will be very disappointed when they come to IFA.

You won't see flying sweepers, and there are no humanoid robots doing housework in the venue. Outside the main entrance, the most eye-catching signboards still belong to TCL, a regular sponsor.

Tech journalists and content creators will most likely feel a little bored, but if you are a distributor or want to buy new home appliances for your new house, you will definitely find suitable solutions here.

At the event site, we can see colorful backboards with the IFA logo everywhere. The slogan "The future is now." is hung in many corners of the exhibition hall, with particularly prominent characters.

But IFA is a pragmatic exhibition. Technical parameter cards and applicable scenario descriptions are attached next to each device. French users hold the chassis of the sweeper, repeatedly compare the structural differences of the cleaning cloth, and confirm the actual function of the mechanical arm; there are also distributors who flew in specially from the Netherlands and Australia, squatting down around a lawn mower to study the chassis blades. It is a venue for enterprises to do business and find customers, not a showcase for showing off technical strength.

The only sentence that onlookers most often ask is: What problem can this product of yours actually solve right now?

Therefore, no enterprise that still wants to tap into overseas markets can or dare to miss IFA. According to the official statistics of the IFA exhibition, a total of 928 enterprises from Chinese mainland participated in the exhibition this year. Together with 84 exhibitors from Hong Kong, the total number of Chinese exhibitors exceeded 1000, accounting for nearly half of the more than 1900 exhibitors. This figure has increased by nearly 35% year-on-year compared with 2025. Its popularity remains very high. We applied for a German visa to attend the exhibition across cities one month in advance, while in the off-season, it usually only takes half a month.

Even with the surging crowd, there are still fewer newsworthy highlights here. Different from the excitement and dazzle of CES in Las Vegas, IFA has a totally different temperament: it is serious, restrained and pragmatic. In this ancient city of Berlin, IFA, which has been held for 102 years, is still as calm and stable as ever, and everything is unhurried.

The large advertising screen of Dreame outside the IFA venue (Photo by Hard Krypton)

Don't talk about AI and embodiment, tell me how to mow the lawn

For Wang Shiyuan, founder of Suisheng Technology, IFA is no stranger. Many times in the past, he stood here as a senior executive of Anker, skillfully operating this standard strategy that no Chinese hardware brand going global can afford to miss.

Until Berlin in 2026, he took on a completely different identity. As the founder of a startup AI hardware company, he stayed at a booth that was not as large as before.

The perspective shift brought about by the identity change is very strong. He can still see the familiar hustle and bustle of the exhibition, and he has also read completely different market signals.

Europe seems to have been left behind by the AI wave. A very subtle detail repeatedly appeared at the booth: when he talked about concepts such as AI Agent and Memory hardware in the discourse system commonly used in China, the on-site audience generally reacted slowly and could hardly understand quickly. He could only say: "This can use AI to build your own all-day knowledge base", and the other party immediately began to ask about the specific usage, data storage methods, and whether it can adapt to existing workflows.

Wang Shiyuan communicates with overseas users at the booth of Suisheng Technology (Photo by Hard Krypton)

However, the "embodied intelligence" boom that China has been chasing for two full years can hardly find any echo at the IFA site.

Walk into the booth of any robot brand, and you can hardly hear terms such as world model or spatial intelligence. What is played in a loop on the booth screen is not the cool somersault moves of robots, but the lawn mower stopping on the wet slope after rain, the mechanical arm of the sweeper reaching into the gap between table and chair legs, and the window cleaning robot sliding close to the edge of the curved glass.

One exhibitor half-jokingly summed up to Hard Krypton: "In Shenzhen, if you don't write two pages of 'embodied intelligence' in your PPT, investors won't even pay attention to you; but in Berlin, if you can't mow the lawn well, users will leave on the spot."

Behind this sentence is a set of obvious regional differences in technical narratives.

European users have undergone an identity transition. Ryan Kong, General Manager of European Business at Weilan Continent, told Hard Krypton that its user group is shifting from "technology followers" to "experience result pursuers".

"The way on-site users ask questions has completely changed. They no longer ask about technical principles, but go into details about how each part affects the effect of the mowed lawn." Ryan Kong said.

In the past few years, the lawn mower robot track has iterated extremely fast, and each generation of products has brought perceptible experience upgrades. As the penetration rate rises, European users are gradually completing the cognitive evolution from "looking for products" to "looking for experience" and then to "looking for brands". High-penetration markets represented by Germany have taken the lead in entering the third stage.

Simulated lawn at the booth of Weilan Continent (Photo by Hard Krypton)

This change is directly reflected in this year's IFA booth design. Weilan Continent no longer only talks about concepts such as no boundary and three-in-one navigation, but starts to talk about "hedgehogs". Against the background of prevailing awareness of nature conservation in Europe, incorporating "avoiding hedgehogs" into the product narrative means that the brand has shifted from competition in technical parameters to satisfying local value propositions.

Kuema has sorted out an evolution path of four generations of products over ten years in the exhibition area, intuitively showing the specific problems solved by each generation of products: whether it can climb slopes, whether it will slip down, and whether the corners can be mowed clean. "Users first learn to judge the quality of products by real use effects, and then they have the ability to distinguish brand differences." Angel, Head of Global Brand at Kuema, said. The competition of lawn mower robots is shifting from the comparison of technical parameters to the delivery of experience commitments.

Kuema exhibits consumer-grade and commercial lawn mower robots and pool robots (Photo by Hard Krypton)

The booth narrative of Nishiluo has also changed significantly this year, and the miniature scene of the outdoor courtyard ecosystem has become the focus of the exhibition. The lawn mower robot moves through the simulated orchard, showing stable positioning and autonomous navigation capabilities in complex environments through autonomous path planning; it demonstrates the motion control capability under large slope working conditions through the slope climbing demonstration of the on-site lawn scene. In addition to consumer-grade products, Nishiluo also exhibited commercial lawn mower robots for the first time this year, extending its product territory from home courtyards to professional lawn scenarios such as golf courses and football fields.

These changes directly reflect the investment logic of enterprises at IFA. As category education matures, the core goal of participating manufacturers is no longer channel expansion, but to allow users to intuitively feel that these products are sufficiently reliable and practical through the exhibition.

Nishiluo's lawn mower robot product matrix (Photo by Hard Krypton)

"What specific real problems in the living room and yard the technology can solve is the only criterion for judging quality in the European market." Meng Jia, President of Dreame's Sweeping Robot Business, told Hard Krypton.

"Almost no one here will ask us which supplier's radar is equipped on the sweeper, and almost no one will ask about what AI large model is used behind it." Meng Jia found that the questions raised by European media and distributors are often more direct, such as details like "how deep can the mechanical arm reach under the table and chair legs" and "what bacteria can the steam mopping function kill", and users are more concerned about "whether it can avoid pet vomit".

These trivial questions may seem "not cutting-edge enough" in the Berlin exhibition hall, but they are specific and direct enough, pointing to a highly pragmatic decision-making habit: users and channels disassemble the product into specific actions in real scenarios, and verify its availability one by one.

Dreame exhibits a series of sweeping robot products (Photo by Hard Krypton)

In the other world separated by the curtain wall, domestic public opinion is enthusiastically discussing the implementation of embodied intelligence, world models, and AI large models. In the Berlin exhibition hall, most humanoid robots stand quietly in the corner, like a technical ornament rather than the protagonist of the story.

Walking along the exhibition hall, you will be greeted by a sure sense of pragmatism. Black and white home appliance brands occupy the largest exhibition area. The booths of TCL, Midea, and Hisense are arranged into complete kitchen or living room scenes, with refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, and washing machines arranged in sequence. Visitors can directly open the door, touch the material of the inner wall, and feel the hand feel of closing the door.

At the TCL booth (Photo by Hard Krypton)

Mobile phone accessories, energy storage power supplies, office equipment and other background boards that were previously skipped in domestic exhibitions and CES have little topicality and no sense of freshness. But at IFA, they are distributed in their own independent venues, with clear and clear category divisions: you can find whatever type of product you are looking for by following the street signs.

AI Memory hardware Memoket exhibited by Suisheng Technology (Photo by Hard Krypton)

The products are placed on the counter, with labels marked with parameters and prices, like a quiet shelf catalog. Concepts and prototypes are not popular here, and most of the booths in the exhibition hall display mature, confirmed, mass-produced products.

Technical terms in the European market mostly act as "explanation tools" to help users understand, rather than "marketing selling points".

AI hardware companies and embodied intelligence are scattered sporadically in various corners. Compared with the exhibition areas of home appliance manufacturers that are hundreds of square meters in size, most of them only have a cubicle, a table, and several prototype machines.

CyboPal desktop robot (Photo by Hard Krypton)

Several wearable cameras are displayed scattered at the