In early 2019, FedEx executive Brie Carere unveiled Roxo on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where the plucky same-day delivery bot delivered a pizza to the late-night talk show host, and $100 gift cards to his audience.
“Oh my gosh,” Fallon said at the time. “This is the future. This is unbelievable.”
The next day, the company further detailed the bot’s potential, hailing it as an efficient, eco-friendly way to handle the last leg of delivery, and naming Lowe’s, Pizza Hut, Target, Walgreens, Walmart, and AutoZone as initial partners for its service.
Roughly three-and-a-half years after the Fallon debut, however, FedEx has stopped its work on Roxo, which was part of a collaboration with New Hampshire-based DEKA Development & Research Corp.
A FedEx spokesperson provided the following statement:
“FedEx has stepped back from the research and development program for a same-day bot as we prioritize several nearer term opportunities. We are immensely proud of our role in working with DEKA to advance this cutting-edge technology that has put it on the path to future implementation, and we remain committed to exploring last-mile innovations that align with our business strategy. The collaboration with DEKA has been outstanding, and we will continue to explore compelling opportunities arising from the technologies we have developed together.”
A poster child for FedEx’s innovation efforts, Roxo retained a relatively high profile after its unveiling. In November 2019, it stoked the ire of then-New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who proclaimed on Twitter that Roxo didn’t have permission to “clog up” the city’s streets, and that if “we saw ANY of these bots we’ll send them packing” — though FedEx said that Roxo had only visited New York for an event. The next month, Roxo helped announce Nike exec Willie Gregory as the Greater Memphis Chamber’s next chairman, when it delivered a Nike shoebox to outgoing chairman — and FedEx leader — Richard Smith.
Roxo was tested in a variety of cities, and the company worked through multiple generations of the bot. Over the summer, it had headed to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for further testing.
The bot was expected to stay level on steep inclines, climb curbs and stairs, and travel on a variety of surfaces, from sand to gravel to snow. It was learning how to interact with pedestrians through routing and mapping, and had a library of hundreds of thousands of objects, which it could match up to things it encountered on the street and then decide how to react. Each item in Roxo's database was labeled at least four times: once for what it looks like during the day, once for night, once for rain, and once for inclement weather (like snow).
“It’s very real,” FedEx CIO Rob Carter said of Roxo at the company’s virtual innovation showcase in October 2020. “And you can imagine the difference between a 3,000-pound car, driving around with a person to deliver a three-pound pizza, and something like Roxo, with it’s incredible economics, how green it is, and how efficient it is to deliver on a future that we all see coming at us at a breakneck speed.”
The news about Roxo comes as FedEx looks to cut costs amid reduced demand that has affected results.
In Q1 2023, FedEx earned $23.2 billion in revenue, an increase from the $22 billion it earned in Q1 2022, but a drop from the $24.39 billion it made last quarter. It made $1.19 billion in operating income, a decrease from both the $1.40 billion it made in Q1 2022, and the $1.92 billion it made last quarter, Q4 2021. And its largest subsidiary, FedEx Express, experienced a quarterly revenue shortfall of about $500 million, relative to company forecasts, while its operating income plummeted from $567 million to $174 million — a 69% drop.
