GXO expands Agility's Digit to two more warehouses — the first logistics giant to write a second humanoid check.

On October 26, GXO Logistics and Agility Robotics said they are expanding their partnership to put Agility's Digit humanoid into two additional U.S. sites — e-commerce fulfillment centers in Statesville, North Carolina and Lebanon, Tennessee — where the robots will take on highly repetitive material-handling work. Deployments are expected to begin in early 2027 using Digit 4, and to migrate to the next-generation Digit 5 once it is commercially available. The move builds on the companies' 2024 agreement to run Digit in a live GXO warehouse in Flowery Branch, Georgia, which both describe as the industry's first formal commercial deployment of a humanoid in live operations and the first Robots-as-a-Service contract for a humanoid; Digit has since moved more than 100,000 totes there. GXO is the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider, with more than 150,000 team members across over 1,000 facilities. 'Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them,' said Agility CEO Peggy Johnson, calling the expansion 'the clearest signal that the value is real.'

This is the kind of news the category keeps promising and rarely delivers: not a demo video or a funding round, but a named, sophisticated buyer choosing to grow a paid deployment. Agility paired the GXO expansion with a same-day commercial update that fills in the picture. It named three additional enterprise manufacturing customers in paid programs — 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 leading consumer-products manufacturer — none of whom chose to be identified. It also pointed to AGCO, which agreed on October 20 to a Digit pilot at its Hesston, Kansas plant beginning in 2027; a commercial agreement with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada after a completed pilot; deployments at Schaeffler, which is also an Agility investor; and Mercado Libre. Agility says its pipeline runs to more than 30 prospective customers, including two early-stage discussions about subcontractor work for a branch of the U.S. Armed Services, and that Digit has now logged more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation.

The caveats matter as much as the headline. Nothing new deploys until early 2027, and when it does it will be the older Digit 4, not the Digit 5 that Agility unveiled on September 15 — that model's early customer access is targeted for the first half of 2027 and general availability for the end of 2027. The 65,000-hour figure is cumulative across many robots and sites over years, not the runtime of any single machine and not Digit 5's record. Agility's much-cited 'more than $300 million' in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5 is, in the company's own words, potential value realized over time and subject to contractual milestones — not current revenue. And this is still Robots-as-a-Service: GXO is renting outcomes, not buying robots. Agility is on the cusp of going public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, expected to close in the fourth quarter and trade on Nasdaq as AGLT, backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Schaeffler and Foxconn — which means buyers will soon be able to read audited financials behind the momentum language.

For a procurement team, the GXO expansion is the most useful kind of humanoid news precisely because of who is doing it: an operator with full visibility into its own labor and throughput costs choosing to put Digit in more buildings. That is a stronger signal than any staged demo. But read the terms before extrapolating — the new work is a 2027 event on last-generation hardware, it is a service contract rather than a purchase, and the headline order book is milestone-contingent. If you are evaluating Digit, push for the outcomes that actually decide the business case: tote throughput and uptime per shift at Flowery Branch, the per-robot monthly RaaS rate and exactly what it includes, whether Digit 5's cooperatively safe design clears your site's safety review, and whether the economics pencil out at your own labor rate. The demand signal is real; the deliveries are 2027.