I read the AutoStore announcement about Pio Pal this week and had two reactions. First: good. A piece-picking robot for smaller operations, sold as a subscription instead of a capital project, already live at an apparel brand called Famme. They claim up to 540 order lines an hour and pre-picked orders moving up to three times faster without adding labor. Their numbers, not mine, but the direction is obvious and the announcement is worth a skim. Second reaction: here comes ano

Last week Dan Gill and I spent a morning at Spalding Works, where hundreds of eighth-, ninth- and tenth-grade students moved between tables set up by local employers. Approach Automation had a few stations set up in the hallway. Nobody had to imagine what automation meant from a slide. Some kids asked sharp questions. Some wandered through. A few could hardly keep their hands off the equipment. All of that was fine with us. We did not come looking for a moment where a student

I read Nikunj Kothari’s piece “Deployment Gap” in Balancing Act from September 28, 2026. He wrote it for investors and founders. What landed with me is that I sit on the other side of it, on the floor. One detail from his piece is the whole story. A robot he was told was deployed was not on the production line. The robot worked. It just was not in the process. I have seen that enough times that it does not even feel surprising anymore. A robot gets bought, built, delivered, r

Late September is when the calendar starts telling the truth. Q4 is close. Orders will rise. Trucks will arrive more often. Pallets will stack up. The floor will get dirty faster. Totes will need to move between work areas. Replenishment will become a constant interruption. The default response is predictable: post more jobs, call a staffing agency, bring in temporary workers, and hope the new people become useful before Thanksgiving. I do not love that plan for a six-week sp

A number stuck with me this week. GXO has run 45 humanoid robot pilots. In production this year, the number will be zero. That came from GXO CEO Patrick Kelleher. He also said GXO expects around 20,000 robots in operation in 2026. None of them will be humanoids. To me, that number is not some big verdict. It is a location marker. It tells you where humanoids are on the curve. People talk about this stuff like a robot shows up fully formed one day and then suddenly every wareh

We were looking at robots to speed up order filling. That was the complaint. Orders needed to move faster. The easy move would have been to stay at that level, talk about robot count, talk about travel time, and start designing around the symptom. Instead, we walked out on the floor to watch the process. Within minutes, the real problem showed up. The dock was not just busy. Full. There were staged pallets already sitting there. Product was waiting. Shipping space was tight.

I was with a client who wanted to speed up order filling because it was consuming a lot of labor. On the surface, that sounded like the obvious problem to solve. A lot of people would have looked right there first, and honestly, I understand why. When one part of the operation is pulling that much labor, it gets everybody’s attention fast. It feels like the cleanest place to go make an improvement. But we stopped and looked at what happened after the orders were filled. That

I ran into this on a shipping sorter once, and it has stuck with me because it was such a good reminder of how far you can get from the truth when everybody is looking at a screen instead of the machine. Remote support was convinced the sorter was down. That was what their view was telling them, and to be fair, that is usually where you start. You look at the controls, you check status, you look for faults, you try to figure out what the system thinks is happening. The proble

Things are moving again. You can feel it in the facilities. More orders. More material coming through the door. More conversations about adding shifts, renting overflow space, or finding a larger building. And I do not think this is just a short spike. Some of this is structural. Production is coming back stateside. Tariffs are part of it. The FCC is part of it too. The agency recently added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and power inverters to its Covered List, wh

You can walk into a plant and see an older machine still doing exactly what it was built to do. The motors turn. The conveyor runs. It cycles the same way it always has. What changed is everything around it. The product mix changed. Volumes changed. Somebody moved a workstation. Packaging changed. A manual step got added. The layout got tighter. The people learned how to work around the system instead of with it. Then the machine gets blamed. Sometimes that is fair. Sometimes

When I was a maintenance manager, we were spending almost $10,000 per month on forklift wheels alone. That number got my attention pretty fast. A lot of those failures traced back to things that did not seem important until they started showing up on the maintenance bill. Shrink wrap and floor debris were getting pulled into wheel bearings. Forklifts were also driving over small broken boards, and that was causing failures too. Not every wheel problem came from the floor, obv

Walk onto the floor of any major industry trade show right now, and you’ll see the exact same thing five times before lunch. There’s a shiny new autonomous mobile robot dodging a fake obstacle. There’s a humanoid torso bolted to a pedestal gesturing vaguely at a plastic bin. There’s a pallet-moving machine painted in matte grey or slick white, cruising around a taped-off loop like it just won a science fair. Everyone is building the same machine. Every pitch deck sounds like

Walk into almost any industry conference or executive briefing today, and you will hear the exact same conversation. Everyone is breathless about what is coming next. People are talking about humanoids folding laundry, general artificial intelligence running logistics networks, and drones buzzing overhead in a completely lights-out facility. It sounds incredible. It makes for great keynote slides and flashy headlines. There is just one small problem. While everyone is staring

The first time you walk into a -20°F freezer, your body tells you to turn around. It is not normal cold. It is heavy. It gets your attention fast. Your eyelashes freeze. Your breath changes. The whole place feels like it was built for somebody else. Years ago, I was asked to run a maintenance team in a massive refrigerated warehouse. It was a serious operation, moving huge volumes of food through a deep-freeze environment. There was one problem. I was completely unqualified.

I remember the first time I drove a car with lane assist. I did not know it had it on there. I was on a conference call driving down the road thinking I was losing my mind because the car kept moving around on its own. I did not know it was a thing and it really should have had a warning label. That is how dashboards are that we do not need. They give you guidance you did not ask for, about a problem you did not know existed, while you are focusing on something else entirely.

Most people look at automation through a single lens: ROI. They ask, "How many months until this pays for itself?" It’s a fair question. ROI and payback matter. But they aren't the only questions you should be asking. When you treat automation as a massive, multi-year "transformation project," you aren't just buying efficiency. You are buying a snapshot of your business as it exists today. You are betting that your product lines, your labor availability, and your customer dem

I just got back from Chicago and now we are back in the Northeast doing demos. Automate 2026 was a marathon. If you were there, your feet probably still hurt. I clocked more steps than I want to remember, weaving through massive booths, dodging heavy machinery, and trying to find a booth with a happy hour. Walking that show floor is a workout. But here’s the thing: I was walking to see stuff. I was walking for a look. Most warehouse pickers are walking for a paycheck. After

McCormick Place is loud. Flashy too. And sure, that is part of the fun. But the real excitement is not on the trade show floor. It is next week, when we are back onsite and actually running bots in client buildings. That is where this stuff gets real. That said, the best part of being at the show is still the people. The floor is full of people who actually know how to drive value with automation, not just sell shiny objects. That part is always worth the trip. It is good to

I’m on the road to Chicago for Automate 2026, and the closer I get, the more the World Cup noise keeps finding me. Hotel lobbies. Bars. Gas station TVs. I even saw a video of a crowd singing “Country Roads” at a watch party. I had no idea that was a soccer anthem. For the record... its called Soccer not Football. That windshield time has me thinking about how we build warehouses. A lot of the people heading to Chicago are still shopping for an American football playbook for a

Last week, I was onsite with a client. Big building. Nice building. Half-empty building. Years ago, they laid it out with all this extra space for "future automation." Extra floor. Extra utilities. Extra room for the big plan that was supposed to show up later. And to be fair, that kind of planning feels responsible. It’s easy to get swept up in a ten-year vision. It feels smart. It feels disciplined. It feels like you’re doing the adult thing. The consultant who helped them