GXO now has two humanoids in the running. Apptronik’s Apollo gets a shot at 1,000 jobs

Three weeks ago we wrote that a repeat order from a customer who has lived with a robot is worth more than any demo. GXO gave Agility Robotics exactly that in October. On November 12 it did something different, and arguably more telling: it opened the door to a second humanoid maker. GXO signed a letter of intent with Apptronik that could put up to 1,000 Apollo robots into its warehouses over the next four years.

What GXO actually signed

Start with the wording, because it carries the story. This is a letter of intent, not a purchase order. Beginning in 2027, the two companies will widen trials of Apollo in live operations across goods-to-person and person-to-goods picking, case and tote movement, packing and sortation. Each of those jobs will be checked against productivity, safety and operational targets the two companies agree on together, and only if Apollo clears them do they intend to move toward a global rollout of up to 1,000 robots. The first deployment is planned for North America in late 2027.

GXO won’t be buying the robots outright, either. The commercial side is expected to follow a robotics-as-a-service model, where a customer pays for robots as an ongoing service instead of owning them. No price, contract value, site or first-year robot count was announced, and the targets themselves aren’t public. The announcement also doesn’t say which generation of Apollo would go to work.

Two years in the making

The letter didn’t come out of nowhere. The partnership started in 2024 as a proof of concept, and earlier this year Apollo finished a pilot with GXO in the U.S. focused on autonomous picking of small consumer goods. The two companies have also collected data and run live autonomous evaluations on more than 50 logistics tasks at Robot Park, Apptronik’s training facility for its humanoids.

“We’re defining what it takes to put humanoid robots to work in logistics — measured against real operational KPIs in live facilities,” said Apptronik CEO and co-founder Jeff Cardenas. GXO CEO Patrick Kelleher called humanoids “the latest evolution of intelligent automation.”

Why a second humanoid matters

GXO has been Agility’s anchor customer since June 2024, when Digit started moving totes at a site in Georgia, and in October it added Digit at two more U.S. buildings in North Carolina and Tennessee starting in early 2027. Now Apollo trials begin in the same year. That doesn’t read as GXO walking away from Digit. It reads like a large operator choosing not to bet its humanoid plans on a single robot maker.

The two robots also come from different philosophies. Agility has built Digit around a narrow, work-first design and its own plant in Salem, Oregon. Apptronik is pairing Apollo with Google DeepMind’s AI, and two days before the GXO news, Apollo 2 sorted brackets on live Mercedes-Benz lines running Gemini Robotics 2.5. The GXO announcement doesn’t mention DeepMind at all, so it isn’t clear which brain the warehouse robots would use.

Putting 1,000 in perspective

A thousand humanoids is a big number for an industry still mostly running pilots. It is still small next to GXO itself, which says it has more than 150,000 team members across more than 1,000 facilities. Even if every robot arrives, Apollo would be a specialist tool in a corner of that network, not a replacement for its workforce.

Compare that with another deal from the same week. UBTECH announced on November 11 that Yongda Automotive will buy 400 of its U1 Pro humanoids for car showrooms, a firm purchase but for customer-facing work rather than heavy lifting. GXO’s letter is the reverse: real warehouse tasks and a larger number, but one that only becomes real if the trials go well.

Our take

Letters of intent in this industry have a habit of staying letters. What makes this one worth watching is the gate built into it. GXO has already shown with Digit that it expands only after a robot proves itself on its floors, so if Apollo trucks past those 2027 targets, the 1,000 figure becomes credible. Until then, the useful signals are the first named site and the first robot count. Follow Apptronik and Agility Robotics for updates, compare Apollo and Digit side by side in our humanoids guide, and look for warehouse robotics roles on our jobs board.