The next competitive advantage is a better team: human, agent and robot.
Our view: the opportunity is to redesign complete workflows around human judgment, software execution and physical capability. Buying another tool is easy. Building the operating model is the real work.
Original analysis, 20 September 2026. A useful future workforce starts with an outcome: an order delivered, an inspection completed, a customer helped. Map that work across three kinds of contributor. Humans own purpose, relationships and consequential judgment. Agents coordinate information and software actions. Robots perform suitable physical tasks.
A practical reference is DHL's May 2025 memorandum with Boston Dynamics, which set out a path toward more than 1,000 additional robots after using Stretch for container unloading. That announcement describes an intended expansion, not proof that every planned unit has been deployed. It illustrates why a specific operational task makes a stronger starting point than a robot demonstration.
Our recommendation: pick one recurring workflow and define who owns every handoff, exception and recovery. Involve the people doing the work before changing it. Measure service quality, physical strain, elapsed time and the time spent correcting automation. Scale only when the whole process improves. A faster isolated task can still create a slower organisation.
redesign the handoffs before you automate the tasks.
Read the primary source. Editorial interpretation is our own.