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

We all like to think we’re data-driven. You look at the spreadsheets. You check the throughput numbers. You calculate the ROI. Then you start building the case for automation. That sounds smart. But our brains usually play two tricks on us. The first is the Filter for Yes. We fall in love with a technology, a big vision, or a "perfect" future state. Then we start collecting proof that it will work. We ignore the red flags. We explain away the hard parts. We over-engineer a ri

If you walk into a facility and see a robot doing backflips or making latte art, run the other way. That isn't a solution. That’s an expensive science project. In the world of warehousing and manufacturing, "exciting" usually means "expensive," "complicated," and "broken." We don't want exciting. At Approach Automation, we want boring. Those are the primary sectors we serve. We want the kind of automation you forget is even there. The kind that shows up at 6:00 AM, stores pal