Toyota deploys Digit humanoid robots at Ontario plant
Robots-as-a-Service targets factory logistics and repetitive labor, Automation replaces staffing volatility with subscription costs
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globalnews.ca
Digit, a humanoid robot developed by Agility Robotics, performs material-handling tasks inside a manufacturing facility.
Agility Robotics
globalnews.ca
Digit, a humanoid robot developed by Agility Robotics, performs material-handling tasks inside a manufacturing facility.
Agility Robotics
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a Robots-as-a-Service deal with Oregon-based Agility Robotics to deploy “Digit,” a bipedal humanoid robot, at its Woodstock, Ontario assembly plant—an unusually blunt signal that automation is no longer just about welding cells and conveyor logic but about substituting for human variability in the last-mile tasks of factory logistics.
According to Global News, Toyota will begin with three units out of seven allocated under the agreement, using Digit for material handling in manufacturing, supply chain and internal logistics. The robot is designed for repetitive, physically demanding work—exactly the category where injury risk, absenteeism and turnover turn “labor cost” into a stochastic process. Agility’s CEO Peggy Johnson framed the partnership as a milestone for humanoids in industrial settings.
The economics are the point. A conventional industrial robot is bolted into a known workspace; a humanoid is an attempt to automate the parts of the plant that were left to humans because the environment changes—bins move, pathways are blocked, cartons vary, priorities shift. If Digit can do even a narrow set of tasks reliably, it reduces the plant’s dependence on staffing depth and overtime, while pushing management’s optimization problem from “schedule people” to “schedule power, maintenance, and software updates.”
Toyota’s press language—“improve the team member experience” and “free employees for more value-added work”—is the usual HR poetry. The revealed preference is that the company is willing to pay a recurring subscription for machines that don’t call in sick, don’t need breaks, and don’t negotiate. That is not a prophecy about ‘AI taking jobs’; it is capital choosing a different cost structure when the ROI clears the hurdle rate.
What must that ROI look like? A humanoid doing internal transport competes with the fully loaded cost of a shift worker: wages, payroll taxes, benefits, training, safety incidents, and the management overhead required to keep throughput stable. Add the option value of flexibility—being able to redeploy a robot across tasks without renegotiating job classifications—and the comparison shifts further toward capital.
Agility’s Digit is already being used by large logistics and manufacturing operators; Global News notes deployments or pilots with firms such as Amazon, GXO and Schaeffler. Toyota’s Canadian operation—its largest manufacturing footprint outside Japan—offers a high-volume testbed where minutes of downtime are expensive and incremental gains compound.
For labor markets, the uncomfortable implication is not mass unemployment but a re-pricing of “unpleasant work.” If robots can absorb the physically punishing, low-status tasks, wages for those jobs may stop rising—or the jobs may simply be redesigned around supervising and exception-handling. Either way, the factory’s marginal unit of output becomes less a function of local labor conditions and more a function of the price of hardware, electricity, and vendor lock-in.
The assembly plant is becoming a data center with forklifts—except this one walks.