In an exclusive interview with Value Chain Asia, Scott Copeland, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at GXO Logistics, set out how brands and operators talk past each other on automation. Copeland spent his career on the client side of automation contracts before joining GXO in November 2024, having held supply chain leadership roles at a global consumer electronics brand and a global industrial and energy company. He now builds third-party logistics capability at GXO, having previously bought it from the other side of the contract — a dual vantage point that shapes how he reads the automation decisions crossing his desk.

GXO’s current automation footprint sets the scale for that diagnostic. The company has deployed robotics and AI across more than 50% of its sites, working alongside collaborative robots (cobots), and is targeting 2027 for Asia-Pacific (APAC) expansion. Copeland leads that expansion as the executive responsible for bringing GXO’s automation infrastructure to the region where consumer tech supply chain complexity is highest.

For consumer electronics specifically, GXO processes hundreds of thousands of devices daily, spanning direct-to-consumer fulfilment, retail replenishment and returns processing. Chief Executive Officer Malcolm Wilson described the commercial outcome at the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call as translating directly into faster throughput, higher accuracy and lower cost per unit. The 2027 APAC expansion is timed to the region’s multi-origin consumer electronics volumes and the automation gap that regional logistics operators have not yet closed.

Copeland traces the origin of that capability to a gap the 3PL market could not fill a decade ago. “The core gap wasn’t technology availability; it was end-to-end integrated capability at scale,” he said of his time on the shipper side. The market then offered static automation, labour-based scaling and isolated IT systems, when what the operation required was end-to-end visibility, real-time decisions driven by connected devices, dynamic order orchestration across every node, and global data standardisation. That forced the company to build its own digital architecture, including a control-tower layer, and to use 3PLs as execution partners rather than transformation leaders. Over time, the strongest of those partnerships matured into joint development relationships with shared responsibility for the outcome.

One of those transformations was mostly not about the technology. “The transformation was 30% technology and 70% organizational change,” Copeland said. The team redesigned the network around a regional footprint with a global backbone, delayed final product configuration closer to the customer, pulled omnichannel fulfilment from shared inventory pools, and built a single source of truth for global inventory. The decisive shift came from breaking functional silos, aligning measures such as total cost of delivery and perfect-order rates, and embedding data-driven decisions across the organisation. “Technology enabled the transformation, but changing the operating model made it stick.”

That history shapes how Copeland reads the contracts crossing his desk now. Companies can often over-specify automation, he said, locking themselves into fixed designs and rigid systems that cannot adapt as demand and order profiles change. The fix is to define the business outcomes the organisation needs rather than the logistics constraints, and to resist the urge to optimise on cost alone. “Logistics should be a single-digit percentage of your costs as an organization,” he said, which means the better question is what those services enable in growth, agility and speed, not how far the execution cost can be driven down before the provider can no longer pivot or innovate.

The APAC automation challenge, in Copeland’s account, is structurally different from Europe or North America. The region combines uneven labour economics, fragmented markets, variable infrastructure, high-density real estate and diverse e-commerce demand patterns. High-cost, high-density cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, paired with irregular building layouts, push demand toward vertical automation that densifies storage and complicates the retrofitting of existing sites. Demographics compound the pressure. “We also must factor in birth rate dynamics when looking at automation,” he said, because in an industry that already struggles to attract young workers, falling birth rates strengthen the case for advanced automation and lights-out operations.

Where automation still breaks down is the part Copeland is most precise about. Exception handling, product variability, new product introductions, value-added services and complex fulfilment logic still require human judgement that technology has not replicated. A more fragmented world has increased ambiguity around channel prioritisation, product redesigns and late-stage differentiation, and with it the demand for human oversight. AI may close some of that gap over time, he said, but the systems need data and time to adapt to the specifics of each business. Robots take the high-volume repetitive work; people handle the exceptions, the variability and the real-time judgement. “The winning companies will be those who design systems that optimize both, not just one.”

The economics underneath that challenge have shifted. Labour cost arbitrage, which historically made manual operations viable in Asia at margin levels that automation could not beat, has been eroding consistently since 2020 as wage inflation in Vietnam, India and Indonesia has accelerated. The automation investment case, marginal in APAC for much of the past decade, is now turning positive at the same time that volume growth in multi-origin consumer tech flows is creating the throughput scale that automation requires to operate efficiently.

The consumer electronics returns challenge adds a layer automation handles unevenly. Sorting, inspection, triage and routing of returned devices requires a combination of machine vision, sensor-based condition assessment and human judgement at the exception level that no current automated system manages end-to-end at commercial scale. GXO’s returns processing capability in consumer electronics is a core competency the company cites in its investor materials, and it positions GXO where the commercial value per unit handled is highest.

The 2027 APAC expansion timeline carries strategic weight given the production shifts underway in the region. As Apple, Samsung and their contract manufacturers build out Indian and Vietnamese assembly capacity, the fulfilment and returns infrastructure to serve those operations must be constructed alongside it. A factory in India that produces iPhones but cannot connect to a robotics-enabled fulfilment and returns network remains an incomplete supply chain. The operators building APAC automation infrastructure now are positioning for volumes that will materialise when the current production shifts complete.

For an APAC company designing an automation contract in 2026, Copeland’s argument frames the exercise as a hybrid-operation design decision: which functions absorb robots at scale, which stay with people who can handle the exceptions and the real-time judgement, and which contract structure can absorb the demand-profile shifts that Indian and Vietnamese production growth will push through the network in the next 24 months.