At the 2026 Zhiyuan Innovation Day in Shanghai on October 29, Zhiyuan co-founder, president and CTO Peng Zhihui released Worken (effective intelligent work-hours), the first metric designed to define the value of physical AI, Securities Times reported.
Worken is calculated as active robots multiplied by autonomous working hours multiplied by output-efficiency ratio, intended to measure not merely how many robots are built but whether they can autonomously and sustainably perform valuable work and how much they actually produce.
Alongside it, the 2026 Embodied-Intelligence Industry Innovation Report - compiled by Xinhua's China Economic Information Service together with the CAICT Shanghai Industrial Innovation Center - was formally released, with Zhiyuan named a leading enterprise and its Worken and deployment instances included in the assessment model.
The move reflects a maturing framing of the robotics sector in which investors and customers are shifting from counting hardware shipments toward quantifying real, autonomous task output.
Source: Securities Times / Zhiyuan Innovation Day 2026 (paraphrased and translated from Chinese financial-media reporting; reprinted for informational purposes with attribution).
