What It’s Like to Sit in a $12,000 AI Massage Chair?

It starts with your ass. The Human Touch Super Novo 3.0, which very fancy massage chair company Human Touch let me try out at CES 2026, is a behemoth contraption of a chair that’s covered in leather and is curvy and bulky in a way that, for reasons I can’t explain, kept making me think of the Mandoshawans in The Fifth Element. When you sit in it, slip your arms into the grooves on the sides, and lie back, it slowly rolls back and goes to work.

The first thing I noticed was rotating mechanical fingers sliding around my butt cheeks, massaging my sorer-than-I-realized glutes. Then it was the leg channels gripping my legs while other roving robotic fingers crawled around my back. The booth representative told me the seat was getting a sense of where my shoulders are so it knows how tall I am. Then it spent 10 minutes squeezing my limbs, prodding my back and feet, and bending and flexing me, all while birds chirped in my ears from JBL speakers embedded in the chair. Honestly, I felt a little like a cartoon character in some sort of wacky, overwrought (but relaxing) contraption.

On the right side of the chair was a tablet for beginning or configuring massage sessions. The company says you can also use it to chat with AI, telling it things like what kind of massage you want, but that wasn’t working during my demo—the booth representative said they had to keep it disabled due to the bad Wi-Fi, as it’s a cloud-based AI model.

Human Touch says the Super Novo 3.0 will be available in the first quarter at $11,999. Too rich for my blood, but for those of you who can somehow afford Human Touch’s chairs, you can check them out at the company’s website.

And to answer the question from the headline: it felt great. A good human massage is almost certainly better in every way, but I wouldn’t say no to another go in the thing.

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