GXO's Robot Moved 100,000 Totes — and Still Hasn't Paid Off

By Daniel Rao

The most honest sentence in humanoid robotics this year did not come from a robotics company. It came from its best customer — and it arrived in the same week that customer doubled its order.

GXO Logistics, the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider, announced on Monday, October 26, that it will deploy Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid robots at two more American warehouses: one in Statesville, North Carolina, and one in Lebanon, Tennessee, with operations starting in early 2027. It is the first expansion of the industry's first commercial humanoid deployment, and on paper it reads like a triumph. Digit has now moved more than 100,000 totes at GXO's original Georgia site. The robot works. The customer is buying more.

Here is the awkward part. GXO's own chief executive told investors in August that the company has not achieved a return on investment from humanoids yet — and that it is, in his words, "a couple of years away" from doing so. Asked how many of GXO's roughly 20,000 deployed robots would be humanoids this year, he answered, in a line that deserves to be quoted in full: "In production, zero will be humanoids this year."

So this is not a story about a robot that conquered the warehouse. It is a story about a company paying to find out whether one ever will — and deciding, with unusual candour, that the answer is worth buying twice.

Photo: Engineered Arts' Ameca humanoid, photographed in the lab in 2021. File photo — this is not Agility Robotics' Digit. Credit: Willy Jackson, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

What GXO actually announced

The expansion, announced jointly by GXO and Agility on October 26, sends Digit to GXO's Statesville and Lebanon sites to support e-commerce fulfilment, taking on highly repetitive material-handling tasks. The deployments will begin with Digit 4, the current generation, and migrate to Digit 5, Agility's next-generation robot, once it becomes commercially available. No date has been set for that switch.

The deal builds on a relationship that started with a proof-of-concept pilot in late 2023 at GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia, facility — a site that, according to DC Velocity, handles inventory for the women's clothing brand Spanx. In June 2024 the two companies signed a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service agreement: the industry's first formal commercial deployment of humanoid robots in live operations, and the first RaaS agreement for humanoids. GXO does not buy the robots outright; it subscribes to them, with Agility's Arc cloud platform managing the fleet.

"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 Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Agility Robotics, on an investor call on Monday at noon Eastern. "Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them."

"Innovation is most powerful when it delivers practical solutions that create value for our customers and our people," said GXO chief executive Patrick Kelleher in the joint announcement. "Together, we've helped pioneer the use of humanoid robotics in the warehouse and this expansion reflects our confidence in the technology's ability to create measurable value for our customers and a better working environment for our teams."

100,000 totes: the number that changed the argument

The single most important figure in the announcement is not a dollar amount. It is 100,000 — the number of totes Digit has moved at Flowery Branch. At that site, Digit has worked alongside existing automation, moving totes and placing them onto conveyors, shift after shift, in a live production environment rather than a demo hall.

TechTimes, covering the announcement, put the significance bluntly: the Georgia deployment produced the largest real-world operational dataset anyone has published to support the claim that humanoid robots work in warehouses, with approximately 98 percent on-task accuracy. That 98 percent figure comes from TechTimes' reporting, not from GXO's announcement itself, and it should be read as such — but the underlying 100,000-tote count is GXO's own, and it is the reason this expansion is happening now rather than in 2024.

Across all of its commercial operations and customer programs, Agility says Digit has now accumulated more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation. That is the dataset the company used to design Digit 5 — and, notably, the dataset that convinced GXO to sign up two more warehouses before the new model even exists.

We compared the announcement with what Kelleher told investors in August, and the contrast is the story: the same executive who says the robots have not paid off yet is the one expanding the deployment. Either GXO is throwing good money after bad, or it has seen something in those 100,000 totes that a spreadsheet cannot yet capture. The expansion suggests it believes the latter — and is willing to fund the gap between "works" and "pays" itself.

The awkward admission: no payback yet

It is worth dwelling on Kelleher's August remarks, reported by AI Weekly, because they are vanishingly rare in an industry built on hype. On GXO's earnings call, he said plainly: "We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet. I think we are a couple of years away from that." He pointed to hand dexterity and task speed as the hardest problems still unsolved — the two things, in other words, that determine whether a humanoid is a worker or a very expensive pair of legs.

That honesty reframes the whole announcement. GXO is not claiming Digit is cheaper than people. It is claiming, more modestly and more interestingly, that a robot which moves totes reliably for years is worth scaling before the economics close — because the economics may never close for a company that waits until they do.

The labour context matters here. Warehouses struggle to staff repetitive night-shift material handling, and GXO operates more than 1,000 facilities totalling over 200 million square feet with 150,000 team members. A robot that takes the dullest tote-moving shift does not need to beat a human on speed today to be worth testing at two more sites; it needs to prove it can run the shift at all, without breaking the flow around it. That, by GXO's own numbers, it has now done.

Digit 5 and the 10-to-1 battery fix

The other reason the expansion is happening now is a specification that sounds boring and changes everything: Digit 5, unveiled on September 15, 2026, carries a 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio that its predecessor could not match, according to TechTimes' reporting on the announcement. In a warehouse that runs around the clock, that is not an incremental improvement. It is the difference between a robot that interrupts shift flow to charge and one that does not.

Digit 5 is also designed, per GXO's announcement, for cooperatively safe work in close proximity to people, and for a broader range of industrial workflows than tote-moving. Agility's September release, included in a filing by Churchill Capital Corp XI with the Securities and Exchange Commission, projected an early-access phase for Digit 5 in the first half of 2027, followed by general availability for warehouse, manufacturing and distribution operators by year-end.

That timeline is the bet inside the bet. GXO's new sites will start on Digit 4 and migrate when Digit 5 is ready — meaning the company's expansion is, in part, a pre-order on a machine whose headline improvement is that it stops needing to nap so often.

The factory behind the bet

Agility, for its part, has been building the infrastructure to make good on that pre-order. Its RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon — 70,000 square feet — is designed for annual production capacity of up to 10,000 robots. The company has also expanded its software, deployment and service capabilities, including a recently announced Pittsburgh expansion, and disclosed three additional unnamed enterprise manufacturing customers in paid programs, with more than 30 prospective customers in active commercial discussions across automotive, logistics, aerospace, defence and consumer products.

And there is a stock-market clock ticking underneath all of it. Agility is preparing to become a public company through its business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI (Nasdaq: CCXI), expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, after which the combined company will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker "AGLT". The GXO expansion, announced weeks before that close, is the kind of proof point a soon-to-be-public robotics company needs most: not a pilot, not a demo, but a paying customer coming back for more.

Our take: the most honest humanoid story this year

Strip away the press-release gloss and this is a genuinely unusual moment for humanoid robotics. The field's loudest stories this year have been about machines that promise to replace workers, fold laundry, or staff factories — including OpenAI's planned move into humanoid robots, a company with no hardware track record at all. GXO's story is the opposite: a customer with three years of receipts, telling investors the robots have not paid off, and ordering more anyway.

Whether that judgment is right will decide more than Agility's share price. If Digit 5's battery and safety improvements close the gap Kelleher described — dexterity, speed, and the sheer grind of running a shift without interrupting it — then GXO will have bought the future at a discount, and every other logistics operator will follow. If they do not, GXO will have funded a very public, very expensive lesson in the difference between a robot that works and a robot that earns.

The honest version of this story is also the more interesting one. A robot that has moved 100,000 totes and still has not made a dollar is not a failure. It is the first humanoid with a real balance sheet — and the first one whose customers are telling the truth about it. That is worth watching, site by site, tote by tote, until the ROI line Kelleher drew finally arrives — or does not.

The same governance question now shadows every workplace where AI takes a physical or digital job: who supervises the machine, and who pays when it underperforms? The parallel in software is already playing out — IBM is selling agent governance as 150,000 AI agents loom ungoverned, and SK Telecom is giving AI agents employee IDs, bosses and suspensions. GXO's answer, for now, is the oldest one in logistics: run it on a live shift, count the totes, and let the numbers argue.

GXO Digit expansion FAQ

Where are the new Digit deployments?
GXO's Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, sites, supporting e-commerce fulfilment. Operations are expected to begin in early 2027, starting with Digit 4 and migrating to Digit 5 when it becomes commercially available.

How much work has Digit actually done?
More than 100,000 totes moved at GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia, site since the 2024 commercial agreement, and more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation across Agility's commercial operations and customer programs.

Has GXO made money on humanoids yet?
No — GXO chief executive Patrick Kelleher told investors in August 2026 that the company has not achieved ROI on humanoids and is "a couple of years away" from doing so, citing hand dexterity and task speed as the hardest unsolved problems.

When does Agility go public?
Agility's business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the combined company trading on Nasdaq as "AGLT".

Sources: GXO Logistics / Agility Robotics joint announcement (October 26, 2026); DC Velocity; The Robot Report; AI Weekly; TechTimes; EconoTimes; Churchill Capital Corp XI SEC filing (September 2026 Digit 5 release).

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