Your ERP System Now Runs a Robot

In a warehouse outside an automotive assembly line, a robot named HMND 01 Alpha picked up a plastic tote, carried it across the floor, and set it on a trolley. Nobody pushed a joystick. Nobody called out coordinates. The instruction came from a piece of enterprise software — SAP Extended Warehouse Management — traveling through an AI agent layer called Joule, arriving at the robot over the internet like a task assignment in a shared inbox.

The Register called it the end of autoworker jobs. The reality is more interesting, and considerably more specific.

What actually happened here, in a proof-of-concept test that ran from January to February 2026, is that Humanoid — a UK-based robotics company founded by Artem Sokolov in 2024 — connected its HMND 01 Alpha wheeled robot to the SAP ecosystem via Joule, SAP's AI agent layer. The robot received picking instructions directly from SAP EWM, navigated to the right pallet, grabbed the appropriate KLT box — a standard automotive tote — and staged it for assembly workers. The three different tote types it handled stayed within the machine's 8 kilogram dual-arm payload limit, The Register reported. The customer was Martur Fompak International, a first-tier supplier of automotive seating and interior systems with 30 global production facilities, and the test was designed to see whether humanoid robots could operate inside an existing enterprise resource planning workflow — not alongside it, but as part of it.

This is the part The Register buried. The headline was about robots replacing workers. The actual story is about SAP quietly building the operating system for a warehouse that has robots in it.

"The proof of concept in the manufacturing industry allows us to demonstrate how humanoid robots can act as extensions of an organization's operations by providing business context awareness and integration with existing workflows," Dr. Lukasz Ostrowski, who runs SAP SE's embodied AI and robotics group, told The Register. He called it a shift. That word matters. SAP is not in the robot business — it is in the orchestration business. The robot is the last mile. Joule and EWM are the nervous system.

Humanoid has been moving quickly. The company — backed by more than 200 engineers, researchers, and innovators across offices in London, Boston, and Vancouver — has reported eight proofs of concept with Fortune 500 industrial partners under production conditions, Forbes reported, including Schaeffler, Siemens, and Ford. The Siemens POC is the most detailed: 90 percent autonomous pick-and-place success rate, 60 tote moves per hour, and uptime exceeding eight hours. The Ford Cologne test hit 97 percent reliability and moved 83 units per hour — 60 percent above its 50-unit target — Metrology.news reported. Humanoid claims 34,000 non-binding pre-orders representing roughly $2.4 billion in implied ARR, according to Forbes.

The company and SAP together project a market of $15 billion to $20 billion by 2030 — roughly 300,000 to 400,000 robots — with longer-term projections of $38 billion by 2035, according to Humanoid's own announcement. That number should be held at arm's length. Humanoid has a financial interest in that projection being true. The more credible market estimate comes from IDTechEx, which projects the global humanoid robot market reaching approximately $29.5 billion by 2036, DC Velocity reported. That is a wide range of estimates, and they are all projections.

The International Federation of Robotics published a position paper that serves as the field's most candid reality check. "The high cost of materials and components and the complexity of design and programming renders them unaffordable for cost-effective operations," the IFR told The Register. Battery life remains another barrier — current humanoid robots typically run about one hour before needing a charge, the IFR noted. The federation's bottom line: humanoids will complement existing robot types, not replace them. Broader deployment may come in five to ten years if economies of scale bring prices down. That is a more conservative timeline than the press releases suggest.

And then there is BMW. On February 27, 2026, BMW confirmed deployment of humanoid robots at its Leipzig plant in Germany — what the company called the first Physical AI deployment in a European automotive production environment. That is a concrete data point, not a projection. Whether it represents a fleet or a pilot, a proof of concept or a permanent addition, matters enormously for what it tells us about deployment timelines.

The SAP-Martur POC is probably best understood as a systems integration test, not a robot capability test. The robot's job — navigate, pick, place — is not new. What is new is the software path from ERP to robot. SAP Joule receives a task from EWM, translates it into robot instructions, and sends those instructions over a network connection to a machine running in a warehouse. The robot is the last mile. The middleware is the actual product.

"Embodied AI represents a fundamental shift in how robots understand and respond to business needs," said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP SE, in the company's announcement of the partnership. That framing — robots that understand business needs — is precisely the pitch. Not robots that can pick things up. Robots that can be assigned tasks by the same software that runs the rest of the factory.

Global robotics startups raised $13.8 billion in funding in 2025, up from $7.8 billion in 2024, Forbes reported, even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture year of 2021. Bain and Company noted that humanoid robots drew approximately $2.5 billion in venture capital in 2024 while most deployments remained early-stage and heavily supervised by humans, according to Forbes. The money is moving faster than the machines.

What the HMND 01 Alpha demonstrated in a Martur Fompak warehouse is that the integration path is real. The robot received a task, completed it, and reported back through software that already runs the factory. Whether that software stack scales — whether Joule can manage a fleet of robots across 30 facilities — is the question this POC does not answer. But the direction is clear. The warehouse is being wired for robots. The question is who owns the switchboard.