Automation is coming to warehouses — fast. While some companies like Amazon are developing their own robotic fleets in-house, others have turned to outside players for their automation tech.
FedEx has dabbled with both strategies. And the $84 billion company has landed on partnerships with robotics companies as the best approach to keep up with its peers in the race toward automation.
FedEx’s recent multi-year partnership with SoftBank-owned robotics company Berkshire Grey illustrates its strategy: turn to the experts to develop robots that can take on repetitive, dangerous jobs for humans. Under the non-exclusive partnership, the companies developed Scoop, a bot designed for bulk package unloading, or removing large bundles of multiple parcels from a truck at once.
FedEx will start rolling out these robots to its warehouses through a pilot program later this year. While these robots won’t work with every single one of FedEx’s thousands of unloading doors, the company hopes to be able to scale the bot if all goes well.
Stephanie Cook, director of advanced technology and innovation, robotics, at FedEx, told TechCrunch that bulk unloading is one of the most physically demanding and unpredictable jobs in the FedEx warehouse. This isn’t the company’s first attempt to automate bulk unloading, Cook said, adding they had trouble finding the right robot for the job.
“There’s nothing that is off-the-shelf that we recognize will work for our needs,” Cook said. “We worked with Berkshire Grey in the past and felt this was a good fit for us in terms of a collaboration. We knew it wasn’t something that we could just develop in a matter of months. It was going to take a multi-year journey to get here.”
Bulk unloading is also a perfect role for a robot, O.P. Skaaksrud, vice president of advanced technology and innovation, at FedEx, told TechCrunch. While bulk unloading does require these bots to make decisions, they aren’t as granular as if the bot was picking or searching for specific packages, which makes it a less complicated task to automate.
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“Because we have such variety of package mix, to specialize individual picking, it’s just not gonna be fast enough,” Skaaksrud said. “That was one of the other tradeoffs that we went with here, because there are package unloaders out there that do single picks. They’re not fast enough and not able to do this type of mix.”
Cook said the company is looking to automate the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs at its warehouses first. These tend to be better for automation in general because they’re often repetitive, allowing employees to work less dangerous and more higher-skilled jobs.
Picking and packing partners
The Memphis-based company does develop tech in-house, like the FedEx SenseAware and SenseAware ID sensor systems, both of which help track packages.
But developing sensors and developing robotics are not one in the same, Skaaksrud said.
“The entire package and developing sensor hardware is complicated, but developing robotics capabilities is next level,” Skaaksrud said. “It’s much better and faster to partner with other companies in the field to move faster. That is the way we look at it. We see these partnerships as really benefiting both Fedex and the companies we work with.”
Berkshire Grey isn’t FedEx’s only automation-focused partnership. The company has locked in several partnerships (and conducted pilots) in recent years as it works toward automating more of its process in and outside the warehouse.
Within the warehouse, the company works with Dexterity, a robotics startup with the billion-dollar valuation unicorn status that specializes in robots with a “human-like” touch. It also has a deal with another unicorn startup called Nimble that builds fully autonomous warehouses.
Autonomous deliveries, both last-mile and long duration, are also an area of focus.
The company signed a pilot deal with autonomous trucking startup Aurora Innovation back in 2021 to have the self-driving truck company hall packages for the shipper on defined routes in Texas. The companies expanded their on-going partnership in 2022 and have since completed more than 3,200 autonomous loads.
FedEx also partnered with Nuro, an autonomous last-mile delivery robotic company, in 2021. At the time, FedEx said it was a long-term commitment and that it had plans to scale the last-mile delivery option. Nuro shifted from delivery to licensing autonomous tech in 2025 and FedEx no longer works with the company.
Last-mile delivery is another area the company has tried to tackle in-house with mixed success. FedEx did develop and release the SameDay Bot in 2019 to help with last-mile delivery, but the bots didn’t receive a warm reception — even getting kicked out of NYC by former mayor Bill de Blasio. The company moved on from them a few years later but reiterated that’s still an area they are focused in.
Keeping it real
While the company is focused on not getting left behind in the broader automation race, Skaaksrud and Cook said that doesn’t mean FedEx is going to get ahead of itself either. The company is not just grabbing the next shiny robot or tech each time it gets released.
“Don’t be too focused only on the technology, because then we’re going to fail,” Skaaksrud said. “This is really 3D chess that you’re playing here. You have to solve for all these different, often not so glamorous and interesting components, that are part of the overall solution. We are definitely doing what is required to not only have interesting technology, but interesting productive technology that’s going to solve business problems.”
The company isn’t concerned that its partnership strategy won’t result in a lot of proprietary tech either. Skaaksrud said that the hardware itself is just that — hardware. He argued that FedEx trucks are just trucks and the network and brain behind the company’s delivery web is what makes them FedEx.
While headlines could make it seem that every company is trying their hardest to automate everything, FedEx said it plans to stay calculated as they roll out these new technologies.
For Cook, the main focus of these strategies is still the people who work within these warehouses, which means technology has to be designed to work alongside these people, making their jobs easier, while still keeping them safe.
Because of that, and because the company is focused first on areas with a clear ROI, one area they are not interested in is humanoids.
“The orchestration aspects of multiple humanoids in a limited space that is highly dynamic, you know how hard it is,” Skaaksrud said. “I think that humanoids are very interesting, and we’re definitely paying attention, but it’s this fit for purpose. You got to figure that out because the hype is just really high, but there’s a lot of potential there longterm. But can you have to understand the limitations and set your expectations accordingly.”
