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Forbes Tech Contributor Martine Paris with Agility Robotics industrial robot Digit at a press salon in San Francisco, May 13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Martine Paris<\/p>\n
Digit and I stood quietly on the side of the candlelit room. It was an industrial-sized bi-pedal robot, made for warehouse work. It didn\u2019t talk, but can be enabled to, I was told. Weighing in at around 220 pounds, its eyes dotted around the room as its legs dangled in suspension. There was an E-stop button in back in the unlikely event it were to go rogue.<\/p>\n
Neither of us ate as the press started to fill in. We were at a bougie pizzeria in the shiny East Cut neighborhood of San Francisco, across the bridge from the Musk v Altman trial<\/a> from where some of the media were coming. <\/p>\n It was exciting to see San Francisco back in all its glory, with its speedy Muni cars zipping dreamers and builders from event to event. A future-facing city drawing ambitious people with a passion for vibe-coding agents, free-wheeling Waymos and oversharing chatbots. The town was alive with activity. <\/p>\n I opted to miss a factory floor tour at BCG Edge Expo to meet up with Digit and needed to dart off to a dinner party to meet the incoming and outgoing PagerDuty CEOs John Dilullo and Jennifer Tejada. But first wanted to see if Digit was truly autonomous as I had grown skeptical of hyped humanoids that so often turn out to be remote-controlled and scripted. <\/p>\n Agility Robotics Chief Business Officer Daniel Diez assured me the robot is working on its own, performing its job without human intervention, other than fleet monitoring from a remote operations center.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the conveyor belt gets backed up and there\u2019s no room to load, the robot on its own will decide to keep unloading carts that keep coming, but will stack items on the side until the conveyor belt starts to move again. No human told it to do that, it just understands its job and goes about doing it autonomously,” Diez said. <\/p>\n There are currently tens of Digits deployed across Amazon, Toyota, Schaeffler and GXO Logistics warehouses doing proof of concepts and trials, said Agility Robotics Chief Executive Officer Peggy Johnson. A safety certified Digit Version 5 is targeted for release later this year to operate outside of the work cage and do multiple jobs at the same cost as an entry-level factory worker. With that version the startup is looking to scale.<\/p>\n The company which was spun out of Oregon State University\u2019s Dynamic Robotics Lab in 2015 has raised over $640 million dollars from major investors including Amazon, Softbank, Nvidia and Playground Global at a $2.1 billion valuation<\/a>. Its main competitors<\/a> include Figure<\/a>, Boston Dynamics and Apptronik.<\/p>\n Designed to replace humans in highly repetitive, physical manual work like materials handling in advanced fulfillment centers with hazardous and mind-numbing tasks<\/a>, Digit is on the frontlines of what Agility Robotics co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst calls a robot revolution. <\/p>\n But, at the same time, he also cautions that humanoids are not going into the home any time soon. This is because of cost, safety and training challenges as every home is different.<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely humanoids are going to be part of everyday life. They\u2019re going to completely transform labor and how we think about work. They\u2019re going to be the foundation of economies. It\u2019s going to be a really big change, like the introduction of electricity. It\u2019s just the path to get there starts with things like warehouses, then manufacturing, then retail stocking shelves, then hospitals and construction sites. And then, eventually, showing up in homes,\u201d Hurst said. \u201cIt always starts with the dullest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.\u201d <\/p>\n