Major e-commerce companies are increasingly looking toward robots and artificial intelligence to manage warehouses and customer orders, and China and the United Kingdom are playing key roles in the robot revolution.

Earlier this year, viral videos of robots whizzing around Alibaba-owned warehouses in China made the rounds on social media. The robots were designed by Chinese start-up Geek+ to bring goods to workers, saving them from trawling up and down kilometers of racking to complete orders.

China has been the world's major buyer of industrial robots since 2013, according to the International Federation of Robotics.