Sally Miller, the global chief information officer at DHL Supply Chain, has deployed more than 8,000 robotics systems across the logistics provider’s global sites, an investment in automation that has cut costs, lowered employee turnover, boosted workplace satisfaction, but also, fewer jobs.
“Does it reduce our dependency on labor? Yes, it does,” says Miller. “If anyone says otherwise, I don’t think they are being truthful.”
Miller is a two-decade veteran at DHL Supply Chain, joining the logistics division of the German-based package delivery and supply chain giant DHL Group in 2005 as vice president of IT for the Americas business. She was then promoted to serve as CIO in North America in 2014 and took on the global role in 2024. Miller was thus part of the C-suite team that decided to make its first bet on robotics in 2017, when investor interest in robotics startups was soaring.
The job picture in the manufacturing and logistics sector is complex, because turnover for the sector is high and the industry’s top executives contend that younger employees aren’t too keen to work in labor-intensive tasks. While President Donald Trump administration’s embrace of tariffs was billed as a way to bring back more domestic manufacturing and factory jobs, the sector hasn’t seen a meaningful turnaround to stem a decades-long downturn in employment.
In 2000, U.S. manufacturing payrolls stood at 17.2 million, a figure that dropped to 12.7 million by September 2025, according to consulting giant McKinsey.
DHL Supply Chain focuses on closely evaluating manual human work tasks including picking, packaging, and putting away goods, and then working closely with vendors to design and develop robotics systems that can do the same work. Return on investment varies by site, depending on how many robots DHL has deployed—those hardware costs add up—and external factors like labor availability in each unique market. The sites where jobs are harder to fill are more desirable for robotics, Miller says.
As more robotics are deployed, work has evolved and focuses more on supervising robots and working closely with vendors on capturing data and insights from software and artificial intelligence that’s built into the hardware systems.
“There’s just a lot more you can do if you have the ability to use computer vision to harness that data,” says Miller. She said new advancements in the sector include Robust AI’s Carter, an AI-enabled robot that uses cameras to map out the floor to avoid objects and workers.
DHL Supply Chain pilots new robotics solutions in a variety of markets across Europe, North America, and Asia, always with the intent of selecting systems that can be scaled across the company’s 2,800 global sites. Frequently, new robotics are tested in areas of the logistics floor that are cordoned off to keep workers safe while the systems are tested in a real-life setting.
Miller says DHL Supply Chain has honed in on three key robotics vendors: Locus Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Robust AI. “Having multiple vendors for the same use case is a good thing,” says Miller. “It decreases our risk, because these are startup companies, and funding comes and goes. Not all of them are going to make it.” [Hyundai Motor Group owns a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics]
Warehouse enterprise software provider SVT Robotics connects all of those disparate systems, says Miller, which is useful for faster integration when new robotics are onboarded, but also to ensure that all data—including when orders are picked, confirmation that a delivery has been shipped, and keeping track of current inventory—is contained in one place.
Supply chains and the manufacturing sector have also been battered by numerous disruptions over the past several years, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, a tariff war, and most recently, the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz due to the Iran war. In April, DHL Group said that “despite geopolitical disruptions and ongoing trade tensions,” the company’s first-quarter revenue increased 2% from the prior-year period.
Geopolitical and trade pressures have mounted as the sector is also facing persistent labor shortages. Surveys consistently show that a majority of American manufacturers struggle to attract and retain workers.
Miller says robotics have helped dramatically cut the amount of time a warehouse picker spends walking the floor and have taken on difficult tasks like unloading boxes from a trailer on a hot day. In sites where robots have been deployed, Miller says that turnover is lower and onboarding is faster. “People prefer to work in sites where there’s technology deployed,” she contends.
Venture capital funding has flowed steadily into robotics startups, rising threefold from 2023 to 2025, according to research firm McKinsey. Humanoid robots from Tesla, Hyundai, and Boston Dynamics have garnered much of the press attention, though Miller says this has taken some funding away from the use cases that are less glamorous, but still highly impactful.
“There’s a lot of hype in the market,” says Miller. And yet, with $40.7 billion invested annually in robotics systems, she strikes a hopeful tone. “With the level of investment, we should see some accidental products come out that can benefit our sites.”
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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