This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers hours before it appeared on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here.

The Henn na Hotel in Japan, which from 2015 has employed almost 250 robots to meet guests’ needs, is cutting back on automation after its experiment failed to reduce costs or workload for employees, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The hotel will reduce its robotic workforce by more than half and return to more traditional human-provided services for guests, though it will maintain a number of robots in areas where it found them to be effective and efficient. Its change of direction can offer lessons for companies that are pursuing robotic solutions for customer service roles.

The hotel utilized a host of robots including in-room voice assistants and a robotic concierge. It also put robots to work behind the scenes to complete tasks such as sorting and transporting luggage. While robots moving luggage into and out of storage containers or around the hotel has proven to be useful, most of the other deployments have not, for a variety of reasons.

Foremost among these is the growing obsolescence of some of these robots, with units like the in-room assistants lagging behind consumer AI-powered voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant and leaving customers frustrated with their experience. In other instances, robots didn’t actually eliminate the need for workers, such as at the concierge desk, where robots designed to look like velociraptors greeted guests but still needed humans to make copies of passports, for example.

As companies like LG and Ubtech develop robotic solutions for customer service positions and the likes of Google and Amazon look to consumer robotics, they’d do well to consider the Henn ha Hotel’s experience. The hotel sought to use robots whenever and wherever it could without necessarily looking first at how they’d impact customers and employees.

Most consumers, 61% in all, are still uncomfortable with robots, according to survey data from the Brookings Institution. Though this will change as they are introduced into consumer-facing roles, companies might still be best served by developing technology that consumers don’t necessarily need to work with directly.

Instead, robots should be developed for tasks where they work alongside trained employees and are likely to have the most meaningful impact — companies such as Radial are using robots at fulfillment centers to reduce training time and increase worker efficiency, for instance.