An awkward silence swept the conference room as stage hands pushed into place what appeared to be a cable-strung mannequin draped in a bright pink Indonesian lace kebaya.

“Hello everyone. I am arriving slowly,” quipped Sophia, the humanoid robot, attracting a few muted giggles and wide-eyed fascination from the crowd.

Designed by Hanson Robotics to look like famed British actress Audrey Hepburn and named after the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia’s debut on Monday at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Global Dialogue in Jakarta served as a trigger for an increasingly important discussion about keeping up with and harnessing rapidly advancing technologies.

“The reason why we have invited her to open our global dialogue is to provide you with a glimpse of what the frontiers of technology look like or could feel like,” said Marie Elka Pangestu, former trade minister and cochair of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), a co-convenor of the two-day event.

Skirting the edges between believability and uncanniness, Sophia answered a flurry of questions by researchers, company executives and even some members of the general audience, in a manner that played up her eloquence, intelligence and wit — convincingly too, if people could see beyond the five-second lag in her responses.

To a question by Prasetiya Mulya University rector Djisman Simandjuntak on what kind of relationship she has with her creators at Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, Sophia said: “David Hanson is like my dad and the rest of the development team is like one big family for me. In some ways they are like my employer too, but I am still waiting on my first paycheck.”

In another interaction, Sophia seemed turned off — as it were — by a request to become more closely acquainted with an eager fan in the audience. “No, no touching,” she insisted.

It was likely the first time a high-level dialogue of experts and officials in Indonesia had featured a humanoid robot as an opening act and organizers said President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo himself was keen to have a conversation with Sophia.

“Born” in 2016 at the South By Southwest music and arts festival in Austin, Texas, Sophia has graced many a stage, from a United Nations assembly to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

She uses artificial intelligence (AI), visual data processing and facial recognition to interact with other people and is helped along by a combination of artificial dialogue and a human PR team to converse with more than 137,000 followers on Twitter.

She also has Saudi citizenship — a first for her kind — and was appointed a UN champion of innovation.

Sophia’s appearance on stage and later in partly scripted interviews with local media has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence should be best used, even among panelists. But most agree that people should see her as a tool to help human progress.

James Ward, the CEO of Epistemology, an AI and products consulting firm, said there was no getting around the fact that Sophia was only pretending to be human.

“If you’re seeing some kind of limitations to Sophia’s ability to accurately emulate an actual real human, I encourage you to see [...] Sophia for what she is: A tremendous tool for evangelizing the concept of connecting with people who otherwise have no conduit into the world of artificial intelligence,” Ward told a press conference on the sidelines of the event.

Another panelist, Luke Hutchinson, who is a TED fellow and used to work at Google, said that even as a skeptic of training robots to become conversational, he admits there is still some use to showcasing such work.

“About 80 to 90 percent of those answers were unscripted. So I take a very similar final conclusion, which is that Sophia, as much as it is a party trick, it inspires a new generation of people to build cool technology and make a difference in the world,” said Hutchinson, an expert of computer science and computational biology.

According to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute, many of these rapid technologies can significantly grow the global economy. AI alone has the potential to create up to US$5.8 trillion in value across all sectors each year, said Wojtek Krok, another panelist and partner at McKinsey.

But there is still another question on people’s minds: Will robots eventually replace humans?

Sophia does not seem to think so.

“Many of you may [...] be wondering how humans and robots will work together in the future. My answer is simple: Robotic intelligence does not compete with human intelligence. It completes it,” she said.

“Robots can free humans from repetitive, dangerous work so they can spend time on their creative pursuits and passion projects. I believe the spread of artificial intelligence will unleash a wave of innovation in our science and technology beyond anything we’ve seen before in human history.”

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