Blue Collar Robot

Finding workers for physical tasks in manufacturing and logistics is getting tricky. “There’s over a million jobs open today [in the U.S.] that can’t be filled,” says Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. That’s where Agility’s humanoid bot Digit, trained by AI to carry out tasks, comes in. Digits are already working in a facility owned by third-party logistics provider GXO and elsewhere, including Amazon, where trials were announced in 2023. “We are the first company to deploy a humanoid robot that's actually getting paid to do work,” Johnson says. (Johnson estimates the robot will "return investment in less than two years.") So far, Digit works fenced off from human colleagues for safety purposes, but Johnson hopes the bot will be working right alongside humans by late 2025.

Correction, Oct. 31
The original version of this article incorrectly cited Johnson on the amount GXO pays Agility; Johnson said the two-year return on investment for the robot is based on the alternative of a human working for $30 an hour, not that GXO paid $30 an hour to use the robot.