CONFIRMED
GXO and Agility Robotics have expanded their robots-as-a-service agreement, adding Digit humanoid deployments at two more U.S. warehouses, one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee. The expansion comes with an unusually frank caveat: GXO CEO Patrick Kelleher told investors in August that the company has not yet earned a return on humanoids and is about two years from doing so.
What we know
According to The Robot Report, which quoted Agility’s statement, Agility CEO Peggy Johnson said GXO was the first customer to put Digit to work in live operations under a commercial agreement. She called the move to more sites “the clearest signal that the value is real.” That is the vendor grading its own homework. Repeat business is a meaningful signal, but it is not independent validation.
The more useful number came from the customer. On GXO’s Q2 2026 earnings call in August, Kelleher said, “We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet,” as quoted by The Robot Report. He put that milestone about two years away and said GXO had completed 45 humanoid pilots, with another launching in Europe.
The task record is concrete, if narrow. Digit received 2026 RBR50 honors from The Robot Report for moving more than 100,000 totes for GXO. The relationship started with a proof-of-concept pilot at Flowery Branch, Georgia, in late 2023 and became a multi-year RaaS agreement in June 2024. The companies describe that deal as the first formal commercial humanoid deployment in live operations and the first humanoid RaaS deal. Those are their claims.
GXO is not exclusive. The Robot Report says it has also tested Apptronik’s Apollo and Reflex Robotics’ Reflex.
On the Agility side, an October 26, 2026 company press release highlighted three additional manufacturing customers and a pipeline of more than 30 prospective customers. Agility is preparing to list on Nasdaq as AGLT through a business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI, expected to close in Q4 2026, according to the release and Investing.com. In October, The Robot Report also reported that Agility picked Nyobolt for fast charging, expanded its NVIDIA partnership, and plans to deploy Digit at an AGCO factory in 2027.
What we don’t know yet
How many Digits are actually working. None of the coverage gives a fleet size for GXO, for the two new sites, or overall.
How autonomous they are. No source says whether Digit’s work at Flowery Branch is fully autonomous or involves teleoperation, and no demo or video accompanied this announcement. Until someone says, treat autonomy as unverified.
Which robot is deployed. Agility unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, per Investing.com’s coverage, but nothing we have says which version is going into North Carolina and Tennessee.
What the new sites will do. Tote handling is the documented task. Whether the new deployments expand beyond it has not been stated.
What it means
The honest read is that this is a scaling decision made before the math works. GXO is adding sites while its own CEO says payback is roughly two years off. That is a reasonable bet for a logistics operator that wants to learn early, and the 45 completed pilots suggest it is shopping carefully rather than committing to one platform.
The bottlenecks are the familiar ones. Per an Automate.org summary of Kelleher’s remarks on the Q2 call and at a September Jefferies conference, he said hand dexterity and task speed remain major challenges. That is a secondary summary, not a transcript, but it matches what anyone who has watched humanoids in a warehouse would expect. Moving totes is a solvable job. Matching human pick rates with human-like hands is not solved yet.
Timing matters too. Agility is heading toward a public listing, and a customer expansion makes a good headline for an investor call. That does not make the expansion less real. It does mean the customer’s caution deserves as much weight as the vendor’s enthusiasm. For now, the most reliable signal in this story is GXO saying, on the record, that humanoids are not paying for themselves yet.
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