GXO and Agility sign the first commercial humanoid RaaS agreement

Background

Logistics warehouses are built around repetitive material handling: goods arrive in bins and totes, are sorted, moved, and loaded onto conveyors or trucks. Much of that work has already been partly automated with conveyor systems and collaborative robots — cobots — machines designed to work alongside people rather than behind a safety fence. Humanoid robots are an attempt to add a more flexible machine to that mix: because they are shaped like people, they can in principle use workspaces, tools and routes that were designed for human workers.

Agility Robotics makes a humanoid robot called Digit. GXO Logistics is a logistics company that runs logistics operations. Before the commercial agreement, the two companies ran a proof-of-concept pilot in late 2023 to test the robot in a live logistics operation ^[1].

What was announced

On 27 June 2024, GXO Logistics and Agility Robotics announced a multi-year agreement to deploy Digit in GXO's logistics operations ^[1]. The robots were not deployed alone: GXO brought in Digit together with Agility Arc, Agility's cloud automation platform for managing fleets of Digit robots ^[1]. The deployment was at a GXO facility near Atlanta ^[2].

What Digit actually did

The timing is worth noticing. Digit's first day of work at GXO was 5 June 2024, earlier than the announcement, and it completed that day as part of regular operations rather than as a trial ^[3]. At the SPANX facility, the robot moved totes from cobots onto conveyors ^[1]. Put plainly, a cobot handles a tote and the humanoid takes it from there and places it on a conveyor that carries it onward. In that arrangement the humanoid does not replace the existing automation; it bridges two pieces of it.

Why the companies called it a first

Agility described the agreement as the industry's first formal commercial deployment of humanoid robots, and the first Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) deployment of humanoid robots ^[1][3]. RaaS means the customer buys the work the robot does rather than the machine itself: the vendor keeps ownership of the hardware and takes responsibility for running and managing the fleet. For a young hardware category, that model lowers the one-off capital cost for the customer, and it ties the vendor's revenue to whether the robots are actually working.

The executives quoted around the announcement framed it the same way. Adrian Stoch, GXO's Chief Automation Officer, said the companies were building on the previous year's pilot ^[1]. Peggy Johnson, Agility's CEO, said her company was the first with humanoid robots deployed at a customer site and generating revenue ^[1].

Where it sits

Seen against the longer story of humanoid robotics, the record marks a change of stage: from laboratory demonstrations and short pilots to a regular shift at a customer site, under a multi-year agreement rather than a trial that ends when the pilot does ^[1]. The scope, however, is narrow. The work described publicly is a single task — moving totes from cobots onto conveyors — at one named facility ^[1]. In this agreement the humanoid's role is clear and limited: it covers the join between existing pieces of an automated line, the place where goods still have to be handed from one machine to the next.