AGCO signs Agility Robotics for a Digit pilot in Kansas starting in 2027

AGCO, the agricultural machinery maker, and Agility Robotics signed a commercial agreement on Oct 20 to pilot the Digit humanoid at AGCO's Hesston, Kansas production facility, with the work expected to begin in 2027. The robots will start on parts sorting and stacking and the placement of totes for storage, and AGCO frames the deal around ergonomic safety — moving repetitive and physically demanding tasks off people.

The detail worth reading is the shape of the order. Agility's customer list now runs Toyota, GXO, Schaeffler and AGCO, and the announced tasks are the same short list in almost every 2026 manufacturing pilot: sort, stack, move totes. That is a fair description of the binding use case, but it is also the work that fixed automation and autonomous mobile robots already do in many warehouses. AGCO says it is exploring humanoids for flexible, human-centric workflows, which is the part conveyors and cobots handle least well.

A pilot named for 2027

The agreement names no robot count and no pricing structure, so scale is the open variable, and the 2027 start date puts the deployment in the same year Agility expects first deliveries of Digit 5. Digit 5 is the version Agility says can work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour day, using Nyobolt batteries that recharge in nine minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio against Digit 4's 2:1. Agility’s forward-looking disclosures connect Digit 5 with the AGCO relationship, but the announcement does not specify which Digit model this pilot will use. Treating the timing as a firm model commitment would go beyond the published agreement.

Agility also carries more than 65,000 hours of claimed real-world Digit operation, which is the number that separates it from humanoid vendors still showing demonstrations. The company is preparing to list through a business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI.

The checkpoint is the 2027 start and whether AGCO publishes a robot count and a task list with throughput behind it.