GXO puts Agility’s Digit humanoids in two more warehouses before they pay off

Agility Robotics’ Digit, a two-legged humanoid robot that lifts plastic totes onto conveyor belts, is going to work in two more warehouses run by GXO, which calls itself the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics provider. The robots will handle e-commerce fulfillment at GXO sites in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, where they will do what the companies describe as highly repetitive material-handling work. GXO’s own chief executive has said humanoids have not paid for themselves yet.

That gap matters beyond one logistics company. GXO is the customer every humanoid maker points to, because it was the first to put one to work in a live warehouse under a paid contract. Each new GXO site strengthens the argument that legged robots belong on real shop floors, and so far that argument rests on one warehouse in Georgia.

In Flowery Branch, Georgia, where the partnership started as a proof-of-concept pilot, Digit works alongside the building’s existing automation, picking up totes and placing them on conveyors. The companies say it has moved more than 100,000 totes there. GXO does not buy the robots outright. It rents them under what both firms call the first robots-as-a-service agreement for humanoids, and Agility runs the fleet through its cloud software, Agility Arc.

Agility chief executive Peggy Johnson presented the expansion as proof. “Expanding to additional sites is the clearest signal that the value is real,” she said. In her words, customers “are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them.”

GXO’s own numbers are more cautious. On the company’s last earnings call, chief executive Patrick Kelleher told analysts GXO had run 45 humanoid pilots. “We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet,” he said. “I think we are a couple of years away from that.” Asked how many of the roughly 20,000 robots GXO is deploying across its network this year would be humanoids, he answered: “In production, zero will be humanoids this year.” At an investor conference weeks later, he named hand dexterity and task speed as the hardest remaining problems. A humanoid can do the job, just not yet as fast as a human worker.

Neither company has said how much GXO is spending on the two new sites or when it expects the robots to break even, as The Robot Report pointed out. Digit is not GXO’s only bet either: it has also tested Apptronik’s Apollo and Reflex Robotics’ Reflex. The announcement also came on the same day Agility held an investor call, as it prepares to go public through a merger with a blank-check company.

For now this is a North American story. Both new sites are in the US, the Georgia warehouse is GXO’s only live humanoid operation, and Digit is not sold to consumers. Kelleher said in the summer that another humanoid pilot was about to start in Europe, without naming the site, and there is no announced Digit deployment in Asia or Latin America. Agility’s other disclosed customers are factories: Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada signed a commercial agreement after a pilot, auto supplier Schaeffler is deploying Digit, and farm-equipment maker AGCO plans a pilot at its plant in Hesston, Kansas, in 2027.

The Statesville and Lebanon deployments are expected to begin in early 2027 with the current Digit 4. GXO says it will move to Digit 5, unveiled on September 15, once that model is commercially available. Agility targets early customer access in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027, and says the new robot is designed to work safely in close proximity to people and to take on a wider range of industrial jobs.

Agility expects its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, after which it plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. It reports more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5, a figure it says depends on contractual milestones and is not current revenue. Its RoboFab plant in Salem, Oregon, is designed to build up to 10,000 robots a year. At GXO, for now, the robots that pay their way are the ones without legs.

Tags: humanoid robots, Agility Robotics, Digit, GXO, Patrick Kelleher, Peggy Johnson