Peggy Johnson’s Agility wins two more GXO warehouses for its humanoids

GXO Logistics said on 26 October that it will deploy Agility Robotics’ Digit humanoid robot at two more of its US warehouses, in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, with work expected to start in early 2027. Agility published a commercial update the same day, ahead of an investor call hosted by its chief executive, Peggy Johnson.

GXO calls itself the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics provider, and Agility’s update puts it at more than 150,000 staff across more than 1,000 facilities. It runs warehouses on contract for other companies, which places it between the makers of humanoid robots and the businesses that outsource their storage and fulfillment to it rather than run it themselves.

“GXO was the first customer to put Digit to work in live operations under a commercial agreement, and expanding to additional sites is the clearest signal that the value is real,” said Johnson. “Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them.”

The GXO extension is the firmest evidence in the update that a humanoid can keep its place in a live warehouse on commercial terms. The rest of Agility’s update shows how much of the market it describes is still at the pilot, the promise or the unnamed stage.

Two years and 100,000 totes

The two companies started with a proof-of-concept pilot at GXO’s Flowery Branch site in Georgia in late 2023. In June 2024 they signed a multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement, under which GXO pays for the robots’ work as a service and Agility supplies Digit and Agility Arc, its cloud software for managing robot fleets. At Flowery Branch, Digit works alongside the existing automation, moving totes and placing them onto conveyors.

Since then Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes there, according to the companies. Over the 28 months from June 2024, that is an average of at least 3,500 totes a month. Neither company says how many robots did that work, what GXO pays for it or how the cost compares with the people and conveyors around it.

Patrick Kelleher, GXO’s chief executive, said the expansion “reflects our confidence in the technology’s ability to create measurable value for our customers and a better working environment for our teams”. At the new sites, Digit will take on highly repetitive material-handling tasks in ecommerce fulfillment, starting on the current Digit 4 and moving to Digit 5 once it is commercially available.

Customers without names

Agility used the update to add three enterprise manufacturing customers, all in paid programs. None is named. Agility describes them as a major global automaker that sells more than three million vehicles a year, one of the world’s largest developers of automotive technology and components, and a global consumer products manufacturer. It says they chose not to be identified, which it calls common among early adopters.

AGCO announced on 20 October a Digit pilot at its Hesston, Kansas, plant, due to begin in 2027. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada signed a commercial agreement after a pilot. Schaeffler, which is also an Agility investor, is deploying Digit in automotive manufacturing. Mercado Libre, the Latin American ecommerce group, is listed as a customer without further detail.

Beyond those, Agility says it has more than 30 prospective customers, either in active commercial talks or in its Customer Acceleration Program, where companies test Digit against their own operational requirements before any wider deployment.

Orders for a robot still in development

The largest number in the update is the one Agility hedges most. It has disclosed more than $300m (£225m) in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5, the model it unveiled on 15 September 2026. Agility says the figure is potential value to be realized over time, subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications, and that it is not current-period revenue.

Digit 5 is designed for cooperatively safe work close to people and to cover a wider range of industrial work. Early customer access is expected in the first half of 2027, with general availability targeted for the end of 2027. The robot those orders are for is therefore more than a year from general sale.

Agility has built capacity ahead of that. It says RoboFab, its 70,000 sq ft factory in Salem, Oregon, is designed to make up to 10,000 robots a year, and that Digit has logged more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation across its customers. The company is also preparing to list on Nasdaq under the ticker AGLT through its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, which it expects to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The commercial update and investor call came in the weeks before that expected listing.

A humanoid inside the logistics contract

For a mid-sized retailer or manufacturer, the GXO deal shows the form in which a humanoid is most likely to turn up first: inside an outsourced warehouse, rented from the robot maker by the logistics operator, rather than bought outright by the client. GXO has now committed to that model at three sites. What neither company has published is the robot count, the cost per tote or the uptime that would show a client whether the humanoid in its operator’s warehouse is cheaper than the person or conveyor it sits beside.