GXO Scales Agility Humanoids to Two More DCs After 100,000-Tote Trial

GXO will deploy Agility Robotics' Digit humanoids at distribution centers in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, expanding a partnership that has already moved more than 100,000 totes at a Georgia warehouse since 2024.

The Georgia site in Flowery Branch, which handles inventory for the womenswear brand Spanx, served as the proving ground. There, GXO ran Digit units under a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) agreement, pairing the robots with Agility Arc — Agility's cloud platform for managing robot fleets and integrating them into live operations. Digit worked alongside existing automation, moving totes and placing them onto conveyors.

Now the contract logistics giant is scaling up. The new deployments will support e-commerce fulfillment, taking on highly repetitive material-handling tasks at the two new sites.

What changes for shippers and 3PL customers?

The practical question is whether humanoids can hold up outside a supervised pilot. GXO's answer, judging by the expansion, is yes. The Flowery Branch figure — 100,000-plus totes moved — is the industry's most concrete datapoint yet that a humanoid can do repetitive tote handling reliably in an active, revenue-generating warehouse.

The commercial structure matters too. RaaS means GXO pays for capability rather than capital equipment, lowering the barrier to trialing automation in facilities where a full retrofit never penciled out. For shippers whose inventory sits in GXO-run DCs, that translates into a bet on labor-elastic fulfillment without a headcount cliff — the robots absorb the repetitive work, people do the rest.

A generational handoff: Digit 4, then Digit 5

Deployments at Statesville and Lebanon are expected to begin in early 2027, running on Digit 4 and migrating to Digit 5 once that model becomes commercially available. Agility says Digit 5 is designed for cooperatively safe work in close proximity to people and targets a broader range of industrial workflows than its predecessor.

So the early-2027 date comes with a built-in upgrade path. GXO gets hardware in the door first, then swaps in the next generation when it ships.

Agility's CEO was blunt about the signal the deal sends. "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," Peggy Johnson said. "Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them."

Johnson added that years of real work in GXO's operations have shaped how Agility builds, deploys and supports Digit, and that the company is "focused on disciplined execution" as the partnership grows.

Manufacturing muscle behind the robots

To back broader commercial adoption, Agility has built out infrastructure to manufacture, deploy and support humanoids at scale. The centerpiece is RoboFab, a 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon — roughly the footprint of a large supermarket — designed for an annual production capacity of up to 10,000 robots.

That number frames the ambition. Ten thousand units a year is no lab-scale operation; it's the kind of output you build when customers ask not "does it work?" but "how many can you send?"

GXO is hedging its bets

Agility isn't GXO's only humanoid dance partner. The company has also run separate pilots with Apptronik — the Austin-based humanoid maker that recently landed a $350 million funding boost — and with Reflex Robotics.

In other words, GXO is treating humanoids the way a smart buyer treats any young technology: trial several vendors, scale the one that performs. That's cold comfort for Agility's competitors, and a useful precedent for other 3PLs weighing whether to commit.

What comes next

The early-2027 rollout gives the industry a clear checkpoint. If Digit handles e-commerce fulfillment at Statesville and Lebanon the way it handled totes in Georgia — six figures' worth — expect the next expansion to cover more sites, more workflows, and quite possibly Digit 5 from day one.