Malta's businesses pay the Chamber of Commerce to think, and this week they got trolleys. President William Spiteri Bailey told Times of Malta (Tuesday 18 August) that robot waiters may cut foreign labour. A serious business lobby should test that claim before broadcasting it, and his clearly did not. Members expect their president to defend Maltese enterprise with evidence, not with borrowed gimmicks.

The machines he admires deserve a plain description, because the marketing hides an embarrassing reality. What follows a memorised route across a flat floor and is battery-powered we may call a robot waiter. A human, who takes the order and answers menu questions, still greeted the guest. A human still loads the tray, lifts the plates, pours the wine, and splits the bill. The robot replaces one task, walking, the cheapest task in the entire restaurant. For that trivial saving, the president quotes €13,000 per machine, before maintenance and repairs. No competent board will approve that business case, yet the Chamber's president promotes it nationally.

He would have benefited from checking the record, as the world had already conducted his experiment. Restaurants in Guangzhou fired their robot servers in 2016 for spilling soup and ignoring orders. Two of those pioneering restaurants closed, and a third kept one robot as decoration. Japan's Henn-na Hotel, the world's first robot hotel, sacked half its 243 machines in 2019. The robots annoyed guests, woke them at night, and created extra work for the human staff. Chili's, an American chain with deep pockets, killed its robot programme in 2022. Its chief executive admitted the machines showed no clear return on investment. Chinese restaurateurs dumped their pandemic robots the moment real customers filled the tables again. One machine tripped a kitchen worker; others dropped dishes whenever the floor grew crowded. Serious operators who tested these trolleys all concluded they were not worth it. The evidence sits one internet search away, free, even for a Chamber president.

Now drop these machines into a real Maltese restaurant and watch the fantasy die. Robot waiters demand flat floors, fixed tables, wide aisles, and predictable indoor routes. Malta's restaurants spill onto pavements, terraces, steps, and village squares, and thrive there. Servers shove tables together for families and squeeze chairs in for latecomers every night. One restaurateur told researchers that the robot gets confused whenever staff combine two tables. Valletta's stepped streets, Marsaxlokk's quayside and Pjazza San Gorg in Gozo will wreck these trolleys within an hour. Did anyone at the Chamber spend ten minutes testing this idea against reality?

The language claim exposes the sloppiness behind the entire performance. Spiteri Bailey suggested vendors could 'probably' train the robots to answer Maltese voice commands. 'Probably' is not a strategy; it is a shrug wearing a business suit. Computer scientists classify Maltese as a low-resource language with scarce recorded speech data. The MASRI (Maltese Automatic Speech Recognition) project at the University of Malta, based its main audio collection on eight hours of sound. No commercial robot vendor offers Maltese today, and none has announced any plans for it. Customers already complain about waiters who speak no Maltese. The president's answer is a machine that speaks none either. A lobby that demands accurate data for AI supplied none for its own flagship idea.

The proposal also shreds the Chamber's own tourism strategy, which makes his position embarrassing. 'Rediscover to Align', the Chamber's own document, demands higher-value visitors and authentic premium experiences. Its authors wrote a line worth framing: "No-one in the world is Maltese except Malta". His own deputy warned in June that Malta is moving "in the wrong direction". Real spending per tourist fell to €617 this year, from €663 in 2019. Arrivals jumped 16%, yet each visitor left less money behind. During the same interview, his own senior official conceded robots suit fast-food outlets. So the president of Malta's premier business lobby promotes fast-food technology for a premium destination. That segment drags spending down, crowds the island, and strains the infrastructure, which he laments. His own strategy condemns his own proposal, and he unfortunately never noticed.

The broader point falters with a similar lack of thought. He discusses a lack of workers and then suggests reducing the workforce to combat overpopulation. He blames weak productivity, claiming output grows only because the workforce grows. Yet his remedy automates the cheapest task in the restaurant and leaves everything else untouched. He mocked the national target of 4.5 million tourists as planless, while offering gadgets instead of a plan. When journalists pushed him on the arithmetic, he admitted that no magic formula exists. Businesses deserve rigour from their president, not improvisation under questioning.

Then comes the bill, which he wants taxpayers to settle. He proposes tax credits to offset the "quite hefty" cost of these machines. The same catering lobby pleads slim margins and demands VAT cuts in the same breath. So restaurants cannot afford waiters, yet they could afford €13,000 trolleys with public subsidies. He calls these credits "ethical business" rather than handouts, which insults every taxpayer's intelligence. A subsidy that swaps low-wage labour for hardware from Shenzhen buys Malta nothing lasting. Genuine productivity in hospitality comes from skills, organisation, and better-paid, well-trained people. The Chamber once knew this; its president appears to have forgotten.

The alternative sits in plain sight, and the Chamber never mentions it. Malta's public sector now employs over 54,000 people, and the payroll keeps growing. Foreign nationals meanwhile fill two of every five jobs in the broader economy. The government should reassign and train eager public workers at the Institute of Tourism Studies. A career path with proper wages will draw Maltese youngsters back into hospitality. A Maltese server who explains the rabbit stew and remembers your name embodies quality tourism. He greets guests with merħba, recommends a Girgentina wine, and shares a story about the village festa. That performance persuades visitors to spend more and return; no purring trolley ever will.

Spiteri Bailey says digital transformation will arrive whether or not we like it. Nobody disputes that, and nobody opposes sensible kitchen technology or booking systems. But Malta's businesses pay their Chamber for leadership, not for gadget catalogues. The president's job is to defend Maltese services, Maltese standards, and Maltese livelihoods. A robot cannot smile, cannot improvise, and cannot love this country. Malta expects better from its Chamber, and businesses should demand better from their president.