On June 27, 2024, the logistics company GXO and Agility Robotics announced a multi-year agreement to deploy Agility’s Digit humanoid robot in GXO’s operations. Agility described it as the industry’s first formal commercial deployment of humanoid robots and the first Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) agreement for humanoids, meaning GXO pays for the robots’ work as a service rather than buying the machines outright.
Digit is a two-legged, human-shaped robot built specifically for warehouse and logistics work, designed to operate safely alongside people. At a GXO facility serving the apparel brand Spanx, Digit units handle repetitive tasks such as moving totes from autonomous mobile robots and placing them on conveyors, coordinated through Agility’s Arc cloud platform for managing fleets of the robots.
The deal followed a proof-of-concept pilot the previous year and marked a shift from demonstration videos to a paying customer using humanoids in live operations. Agility’s leadership framed the milestone as being first to have actual humanoid robots deployed at a customer site, generating revenue and solving real business problems.
For a general reader, this agreement is a concrete data point in the much-hyped humanoid robot wave: the moment a humanoid moved from stage demos to a contracted, revenue-generating job in a real warehouse.