Peggy Johnson

Peggy Johnson is an engineer-turned-dealmaker who spent 24 years at Qualcomm before Satya Nadella recruited her in 2014 as Microsoft’s executive vice president of business development, where she founded M12, the company’s first corporate venture fund. After four years as CEO of augmented-reality maker Magic Leap, she took over Agility Robotics — maker of the bipedal humanoid robot Digit — in March 2024.

Humanoids with day jobs

Under Johnson, Agility crossed the line from demo to deployment: in June 2024 Digit robots began the world’s first commercial humanoid work, moving totes in a GXO warehouse serving Spanx. Digit units now work in Amazon and other customers’ facilities, running roughly 20 of every 24 hours and repeatedly lifting around 50 pounds. Time named her to its TIME100 AI list in 2025.

Her consistent answer to labor fears is that Digit fills the “dirty, dangerous, dull” roles warehouses cannot staff — telling Fortune in 2024 that unfilled warehouse jobs number around a million, and stressing that Digit is built for structured industrial spaces, not homes. In June 2026 Agility announced it would go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp — billed as the first pure-play humanoid robotics company to tap public markets, with proceeds aimed at scaling deployments and expanding into healthcare.

Critics of humanoid robotics argue the form factor is hype-prone and that “jobs nobody wants” can become “jobs that no longer exist.” Johnson’s counter is empirical: her robots are already clocking shifts customers pay for.