The Wuzhen Summit has concluded, how far are robots from being put to work on a daily basis?
At the "Light of the Internet" Expo in Wuzhen, two robots work in coordination to sort material boxes. The movements on the exhibition booth are intuitive, but problems in the warehouse can only be spotted in the next shift: can the system still recognize worn material boxes? Once the front conveyor belt gets jammed, will all subsequent tasks stop? Who will take over if a fault occurs at night? Shortly before the summit kicked off, a US logistics enterprise announced a warehouse deployment progress: the robots have handled more than 100,000 material boxes in total, and the enterprise plans to expand the deployment to two more sites. From a demonstration in Wuzhen to 100,000 handling operations in the warehouse, what is truly worth calculating in between is whether this process can run continuously and how much it costs to handle each box.
Observe Movements at Exhibitions, Evaluate Processes in Warehouses
On November 5, 2026, the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit concluded. According to reports from China News Service, this year's "Light of the Internet" Expo attracted 671 enterprises and institutions from more than 50 countries and regions to participate, showcasing and releasing over 1,000 new technologies and products, with more than 100 embodied intelligent robots demonstrating operations on site. The collaborative sorting of material boxes by two robots is a scene captured by a China News Service reporter at the exhibition venue on November 2. The over 1,000 exhibits also include technologies and products beyond robots. For buyers, the exhibition can provide a batch of candidate solutions, and the feasibility of deployment needs to be verified against their respective actual processes.
Material box sorting sounds like nothing more than transporting boxes from one end to the other. When incorporated into the warehouse workflow, every link including where the boxes come from, where they are handed over, and who takes charge in case of errors incurs costs. When the boxes are delivered but the system still shows they have not arrived, the downstream workstation may keep waiting for the goods. When the system marks a task as completed but the box is left in the wrong position, employees have to go back to look for it. The robot's ability to lift and move boxes only solves one single movement among all links. What buyers accept is that the material boxes are delivered to the correct position, the records match the physical items, and the downstream workflow can proceed smoothly.
Having Handled Over 100,000 Material Boxes: Why Start with Just One Site
Logistics enterprise GXO and robot manufacturer Agility Robotics disclosed that the two parties launched proof of concept at an actually operational warehouse in Georgia, the United States at the end of 2023, and signed a multi-year robot service agreement in June 2024. The Digit humanoid robot undertakes a specific process: taking material boxes from existing mobile robots and placing them on the conveyor belt. The original transportation and conveying systems in the warehouse continue to operate, and the newly added equipment takes charge of the handover link between the two.
On October 26, 2026, GXO disclosed that the Digit robots at this site have handled more than 100,000 material boxes in total. The two parties plan to gradually deploy the robots to two sites in North Carolina and Tennessee starting from early 2027. This case, independent of the Wuzhen exhibition, presents a timeline covering pilot operation, commercial agreement, actual operation and expansion plan. The cumulative handling volume can reflect the existing task volume, but the announcement did not disclose the completion rate per shift, the frequency of manual intervention, or the cost per box. The performance of the two new sites will have to be observed after deployment.
The commercial significance of this case lies in that the customer first assigns a section of work that can be repeated with clear handover points to robots. Before investment, the enterprise can count how many boxes this process originally handled per shift, where the bottlenecks are, and how much time employees spend on related work. After the investment, measurement can be carried out based on the same task boundary. If the handover efficiency is improved but the next process is already at full capacity, the total number of goods that the entire warehouse can ship every day may not increase accordingly. Conversely, if frequent handover jams hold back the downstream workflow, optimizing this section may allow the original equipment to spend less time waiting. The value of a workstation depends on what problems it solves in the entire process.
At Acceptance, Separate Independent Completion from Manual Remediation in Calculation
Before the pilot starts, the buyer and the seller should first agree on what counts as the successful completion of handling one box. For example, the material box arrives at the designated workstation within the specified time, the system leaves correct records, and the next link receives it normally. The total denominator covers all tasks assigned to the equipment, and records of overtime, misplacement and missing records should all be kept. Performance at off-peak and peak hours should be evaluated separately, and short downtime in the same shift should also be recorded, so as to avoid using a smooth recorded video to represent the performance of the entire shift.
Assuming 100 tasks are dispatched and all 100 tasks are finally delivered, among which 20 tasks require employees to reposition the boxes, rescan the labels or restart the equipment. According to this set of assumptions, the final completion rate is 100%, but the independent completion rate is only 80%. The enterprise also needs to record how many minutes each intervention takes, and whether it is necessary to temporarily transfer staff from other workstations. When engineers are on site during the day shift, a problem that can be solved in ten minutes may have to wait for remote support at night shift. The same completion rate may correspond to two completely different sets of on-duty costs.
Continuous operation also requires verification of whether backlogs accumulated during peak hours can be cleared. When the equipment is down for ten minutes, is there temporary storage space for the incoming material boxes? After recovery, is the processing speed of the equipment sufficient to digest the backlog? If the speed is only enough to cope with the normal incoming goods, a short downtime may pass the delay on to the next shift. During the pilot, under the premise of meeting on-site safety requirements, anomalies such as network disconnection, occupied passages and damaged labels can be verified, to observe whether the equipment can shut down safely, notify the on-duty personnel, and continue to process the correct tasks after recovery. What the enterprise needs is a system that can deliver the goods on time even when errors occur.
The Equipment Is Affordable: Should Long-term Services Be Purchased Together
GXO adopts the Robot as a Service (RaaS) model. When enterprises purchase such services, they can negotiate the continuous operation responsibility into the contract: which maintenance items are included in the service fee, how long the downtime will be during system updates or wearing part replacement, who will arrive on site when the fault cannot be handled remotely, and how to calculate the service time during the fault period. The service model can change the arrangement of upfront investment and subsequent payment, and the final cost still depends on the quotation, task volume and contract terms. GXO's announcement did not disclose the charging details, so it is impossible to judge the payback period of this deployment based on the information.
For warehouses, they can divide the total expenditure in the same period by the number of boxes completed on time and with qualified quality, and then compare the result with the cost of the original process. The expenditure should include equipment or service fees, site and system renovation costs, maintenance costs, manual intervention costs, and verifiable downtime losses. Assuming that the total monthly expenditure of two plans is both 60,000 yuan, one plan completes 30,000 boxes and the other completes 20,000 boxes, the cost per box is 2 yuan and 3 yuan respectively. This calculation example only illustrates how the effective task volume changes the cost. For warehouses with peak and off-peak seasons in cargo volume, the cost of peak and off-peak periods should be calculated separately, to avoid estimating the annual total based on the box volume of the busiest month.
When expanding to the second warehouse, there is another easily overlooked replication cost. The positions of shelves and conveyor belts are different, so the interfaces may need to be reconnected, and employees also need to receive re-training. The performance of the first site can help reduce uncertainty, but whether the second site can go online on schedule depends on how much workstation design, software configuration and maintenance experience it can reuse. For suppliers, signing a multi-year service agreement is a commercial progress, but whether they can fulfill the contract stably after equipment deployment and whether the service cost can be diluted with the increase of sites will affect the scale of this business.
The exhibition booth in Wuzhen shows how two robots cooperate. To decide whether to expand the deployment, the warehouse needs to check the records of the entire shift: how many boxes are completed independently, how many tasks are delayed after downtime, what anomalies require manual intervention, and how much each box costs in the end. The next time you see a robot smoothly placing a box on the conveyor belt, you can ask one more question: after assigning this process to the robot, can the next shift ship the goods as usual?
This article is from the WeChat official account "BT Finance" (ID: btcjv1), author: BT Finance, and published with authorization from 36Kr.