It is Wednesday, April 29, 2026. If you’ve looked at a tech headline in the last 48 hours, you’ve seen it: Google’s Gemini ER 1.6 is here. The videos are everywhere. Robots are now "reasoning." They are looking at analog pressure gauges and reading them with 98% accuracy. They are identifying "context" in a room. They are doing backflips on social media. It’s impressive. It’s high-IQ. It’s also probably useless for your warehouse today. At Approach Automation, we’re fans of t

I just got back from Atlanta, and I have a bit of a Modex hangover. If you weren’t there, imagine a million square feet of the most expensive, shiny, and complex technology on the planet. We’re talking booths the size of city blocks, neon lights everywhere, and enough LED screens to power a small country. But I noticed something weird. Walking through the show floor, I saw dozens of massive booths: the kind that cost millions just to set up: that didn't have a single piece of

It’s Wednesday here in Atlanta. Day three of Modex 2026. If you’ve been walking the floor at the Georgia World Congress Center, your feet probably hurt as much as mine do. There are over 1,000 exhibitors here. It is a sea of blinking lights, humming conveyors, and enough yellow steel to build a small city. We’ve heard from the big hitters, too. The Home Depot CFO talked about the massive scale of modern retail, and to be honest I am a little disappointed that Dale Earnhardt J

Next week, Atlanta gets loud. Modex 2026 is officially taking over the Georgia World Congress Center from April 13th to 16th. If you’ve never been, picture this: over 1,000 exhibitors, 40,000 attendees, and enough flashing LED lights and whirring robot arms to make you feel like you’ve stepped onto a sci-fi movie set. It’s big. It’s overwhelming. And for a lot of business owners and operations managers, it’s a little bit terrifying. You walk in looking for a way to fix a labo

If you walk into a facility and see a robot doing backflips or making latte art, run the other way. That is not an industrial solution. That is an expensive science project. In the world of logistics, manufacturing, and facility management, "exciting" usually means "expensive," "complicated," and "broken." We don’t want exciting. We want boring. At Approach Automation, we believe the best automation is the kind you forget is even there. It’s the robot that shows up at 6:00 AM