Humanoid robots reached the production line this month. Nobody has made them pay yet.

What happened

On October 21, Tesla said it had started building its Optimus humanoid robot at its factory in Fremont, California, in space that used to make electric cars. "The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," the company's quarterly shareholder letter said.

Elon Musk was careful with the label. On the earnings call he called it "early production" and warned the ramp would be "somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product." He still predicted Tesla could build 20,000 robots a week by the end of 2027 — a forecast, and a big one. The same quarter, Tesla's net income fell 43% to $787 million, with spending on Optimus, AI and autonomy among the reasons.

The same day, farm-equipment maker AGCO — the company behind Fendt and Massey Ferguson — signed a commercial agreement to pilot Agility Robotics' Digit at its plant in Hesston, Kansas, starting in 2027. Digit will first sort and stack parts and place totes into storage.

Five days later, logistics giant GXO said it would deploy Digit at its Statesville and Lebanon sites, in North Carolina and Tennessee, for e-commerce fulfillment, starting in early 2027 with Digit 4 and moving to Digit 5 when it becomes commercially available. GXO began piloting Digit in late 2023 at Flowery Branch, Georgia, and signed a multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement in June 2024; Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes there.

"Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them." — Peggy Johnson, CEO, Agility Robotics

The money question

The most useful sentence on the subject came not from a launch but from an earnings call. GXO's CEO, Patrick Kelleher, told investors in August that the company had run 45 humanoid pilots. Then: "We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet. I think we are a couple of years away from that."

That is the company doing more of this than almost anyone, expanding anyway. It is a bet on where the cost line goes, not a report that it has already crossed. GXO did not say how much it is investing.

Promises on the record

Timelines in this industry have slipped before. Here is what has been said publicly, and what happened.

Sources: MIT Technology Review (Oct 8); TechCrunch (Oct 21).

Why skeptics aren't convinced

An MIT Technology Review analysis this month gathered the case against the hype, much of it from people who build robots for a living.

• Looking human is the easy part. "It's very easy to make a robot that looks like a person," said Jonathan Hurst, Agility's own co-founder and chief robot officer.
• Mostly working isn't working. "70% success is like it doesn't work, right?" said Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics.
• Homes are far off. Hurst put robots doing useful things in people's homes at about ten years away.
• Most of the hardware is Chinese. Nearly 90% of the roughly 15,000 humanoids shipped in 2025 came from Chinese companies, according to Omdia and Unitree data.

Timeline

1. Late 2023GXO pilots Digit in Flowery Branch, Georgia.
2. Jun 2024Multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement — which the companies call an industry first.
3. Aug 2026GXO: 45 pilots, no ROI yet — "a couple of years away."
4. Oct 21, 2026Tesla begins Optimus production in Fremont; AGCO signs Digit pilot.
5. Oct 26, 2026GXO expands Digit to Statesville and Lebanon. We are here.
6. Early 2027Digit starts at the new GXO sites; AGCO pilot begins.
7. End of 2027Musk's 20,000-a-week target. Forecast.

What to watch

Machines that act need limits before they need speed.

That's the principle NeuroBots is built on: it does the work, and asks first.

See NeuroBots