CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — With the worker shortage affecting everything from restaurant service to giant factory production lines, could the solution lie in robotic, rather than human, workers?

A recent Verizon survey of hundreds of small businesses found that about a third had adopted digital tools, including, in some cases, actual robots.

Tech expert Burton Kelso joined “Morning in America” to fill in the details on how the tech revolution can help break the bottleneck — hopefully without birthing Skynet in the process. He said actual robotics will mostly be present in the future as they have been in the recent past in manufacturing and warehousing.

The problem is that robots don’t have the “soft skills” that human servers do. They can’t tell if you’ve had a bad day and might need an extra break, or if you’re about to pop the question to that special someone and might need champagne glasses handy.

Of course, robots don’t require 401k help, and they never ask for a raise or vacation, but they do occasionally need maintenance, which can come at inconvenient times. You can’t ask a robot to shake it off and keep working when it has a bad circuit board and is running in circles on the factory floor riveting things at random.

The bottom line, Kelso said, is that while there will be more robots in the workforce, they’ll never be able to completely replace human workers — at least not without significant technological improvements, which aren’t even on the horizon as of yet.