Digit 5: when do orders become deliveries?

Digit 5 has a dated availability plan, not a demonstrated delivery total in the sources reviewed here. Agility expects early access in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of that year. Its October 6 investor deck retains that plan and explicitly says the robot is still under development. The $300 million commitment and older customer deployments are separate evidence. October investor deck, risk factors

Peggy Johnson’s argument for Digit 5 starts with the warehouse floor: a robot becomes more useful if people can share its workspace. In Agility’s September 15 launch announcement, its CEO described the new humanoid as “removing a major barrier” to industrial adoption. That is a concrete proposition to test. Agility’s launch announcement

The launch also brings a familiar number back into view: more than $300 million in multi-year orders. Reading it alongside earlier disclosures changes the question. How much of the announced demand will become robots doing paid work, and when?

The order number already appeared in June

Agility and Churchill Capital Corp XI’s June 24 merger announcement, filed with the SEC, already reported more than $300 million of Digit v5 orders. The same passage made them subject to contractual milestones. September’s repeated threshold therefore cannot establish how much new demand arrived after June. Nor does a multi-year order total tell us how much revenue has been recognized. The June disclosure

One customer accounts for the $300 million commitment

The September 4 S-4 is more specific: it describes one customer committed to $300 million of Digit v5 deployment over several years, conditional on contractual milestones and product features and specifications. That is evidence of a substantial commitment, but it does not establish demand spread across many buyers. The filing’s customer-concentration risk

The structure was already in June’s investor deck. Its footnote ties the May order figure to 1,000 robots under a three-year robots-as-a-service contract, with purchaser warrants vesting as robots are deployed. Warrants are rights to buy shares, giving the buyer an equity incentive alongside the robot service. The footnote explicitly separates the potential contract value from current-period revenue. The June deck, page 6, note 1

For an investor, concentration changes the test. Meeting that customer’s requirements matters more than counting prospective buyers in a sales pipeline. Neither disclosure establishes that 1,000 Digit 5 robots have shipped. These are earlier contract disclosures, read here alongside the September launch.

The October deck still dates the order figure to May 2026. It therefore does not establish a fresh $300 million October order. Humanoids Daily’s event report adds that Daniel Diez described task-based releases of robot batches. We could read that report, but not a transcript of the webcast; this detail is attributed to the outlet. The October 6 event account

What the new machine is intended to change

Agility’s product page describes human-detection software and safety behaviors intended to remove the need for external barriers. It lists a 50-pound payload, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio and 20 hours of work per 24-hour day. The page identifies the specifications as preliminary estimates from internal testing of pre-production equipment. The October deck separately estimates up to about 22 hours of battery output in a day. Battery output and completed working hours are different measures; neither establishes customer throughput. Slide 31 Digit 5 specifications

The practical opportunity is easier movement between jobs in a shared facility. The operational question is how much useful work remains after interruptions, charging, handoffs and recovery. A robot that stops appropriately when a person approaches still needs a workable way to resume its task. Throughput and the amount of assistance required would make that trade-off visible.

Safety integration has its own unfinished steps

In a September 21 article, NVIDIA’s Riccardo Mariani says Agility is integrating IGX Thor and Halos Core into Digit 5’s safety system. He describes TÜV Rheinland’s inspection of NVIDIA components for certification readiness and distinguishes scoped Halos inspections from final independent certification. This supplies a more specific development step; it does not establish that the complete Digit 5 robot or a customer installation has received final certification. NVIDIA’s account of the inspection process

For the shared-workspace proposition, the next evidence would identify the assessed system, operating conditions and completed assessment. A supplier relationship alone cannot answer how safely and productively a particular installation works.

There is also an external safety layer to build. On October 1, Agility and FORT signed a memorandum of understanding covering off-robot safety interfaces and a deeper engineering relationship. It extends earlier component work; it is not a certificate for the complete robot. For a shared warehouse, the useful test is whether the robot and the facility’s safety systems work together under the assessed operating conditions. The Agility–FORT announcement

GXO: keep the earlier Digit deployment separate

There is a real customer relationship behind this story. GXO’s June 27, 2024 announcement described Digit moving totes from other robots onto conveyors at a SPANX facility under a robots-as-a-service agreement. Johnson’s emphasis then was on customer value from a working installation. GXO’s account

That history supplies a starting point for evaluating the next generation. It does not transfer the old deployment’s results to a different machine or a broader set of jobs. For readers following GXO, the relevant business question is whether expanded use improves the cost and reliability of a specific workflow; this launch alone establishes no material earnings benefit.

Customer results and modeled savings are different evidence

Slide 44 reports eight robots at Schaeffler and three at GXO, with about 60,000 and more than 100,000 totes moved respectively. Both entries show 98% accuracy, but the slide gives no measurement period or definition of accuracy. These are reported totals, not an October-only increment: the GXO milestone already appeared in September’s launch release. These older-model results cannot be assigned to Digit 5, which the same deck says is not commercially available. Customer examples, slide 44

Slide 45 makes the financial proposition easier to examine: an assumed $8,500 monthly RaaS fee is compared with human labor at $30.50 per hour, using 120 working hours a week for 52 weeks a year. The savings are illustrative, not a customer’s audited result. Economics and footnotes, slide 45

The missing link is productive work. If charging, stops or recovery reduce completed tasks, or staff must keep helping, scheduled robot hours do not replace the same number of paid human hours. A useful customer report would show completed work, retained labor and total operating cost together.

The next dated test is in 2027

The October deck retains first-half-2027 access for existing partners and end-2027 general availability, with European access conditional on regulatory marks. Humanoids Daily separately reports Diez describing wider rollout in late 2027 and early 2028. Read these as stages of a planned rollout, not a confirmed delivery date for every buyer. The deck’s rollout risks The attributed event report

A useful follow-up would name the customer, task, operating period and intervention rate, then explain the cost of completing that work. Evidence of repeated paid operation in shared workspaces would support Johnson’s argument. Persistent delays or heavy supervision would leave the scaling question open.

Updated September 20, 2026: added the June contract footnote and September 4 filing’s customer-concentration disclosure, and linked the original launch announcement. These additions provide historical context; they do not report a new order or delivery.

Updated September 22, 2026: added NVIDIA’s September 21 account to distinguish safety integration and inspection readiness from final system certification.

Updated October 7, 2026: added the October investor deck and FORT announcement, separating the May order figure, rollout stages, older-model results and illustrative economics.

Figure’s work at BMW offers a useful comparison: both stories become clearer when the machine, task and reporting period are stated. For the distinction between a production plan and public sales, read the Optimus timeline.