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

AI is the loudest word in the room right now. If you listen to the news, AI is either going to write your next novel or take over the world by Tuesday. In Silicon Valley, they’re obsessed with AI that can paint a picture, write a sonnet, or argue about philosophy. But if you’re running a warehouse, a hospital, or a manufacturing plant, you don't need a robot that can write poetry. You need a robot that can sweep the floor. You need a tool that can move a 2,000-pound pallet wi

It is Tuesday, May 5, 2026. You just took delivery of $80,000 worth of high-demand inventory. The truck pulled away twenty minutes ago. You know the product is physically inside your building. Your customer is on the phone asking when it’s shipping. You check your Warehouse Management System (WMS). It says you have zero. Welcome to the Dock Door Dead Zone. It’s a place where physical reality and digital records go to fight, and usually, your bottom line is the one that gets a

I didn't spend years building the perfect system; I spent years in operations dealing with the aftermath of a perfectly built system that was fragile and couldn't work if we just followed the SOPs. Something would break, a deadline would slip, and the same frustrated questions would show up: Why didn’t the team follow the SOP? Why wasn’t this caught sooner? It took a few hard lessons to see the real problem. The “surprises” that kept blowing up the work weren’t random bad luc

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

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 almost any warehouse in America today, you’ll see the same thing: people walking. Miles and miles of walking. Pushing carts. Dragging pallets. Hunting for stuff that should be easy to find. Meanwhile, the internet is yelling about "dark warehouses" and humanoid robots doing backflips. Cool. But here’s the real world: about 90% of warehouses are still completely manual. No automation. (Source: Aaron Prather, "The Automation Gap in Logistics" , Six Degrees of R

Everyone wants to talk about the future of work. Humanoid robots. AI-powered transformations. Multi-year digital roadmaps. Meanwhile, someone's still moving pallets across a warehouse by hand. Someone's mopping floors at 2 AM. Someone's spending three hours a day looking for stuff that should've been tracked. That's where the money is. The Problem With "Transformation" The automation industry loves to sell visions. They'll show you a factory floor that looks like a sci-fi mov

I spent years managing projects and operations where I thought my job was to build the perfect, most efficient system possible. But time and again, I’d see these systems hit a wall. Something would break, a deadline would slip, and I’d find myself asking the same frustrated questions: Why didn’t the team follow the SOP? Why wasn’t this caught sooner? It took a few hard lessons for me to realize I was looking at it all wrong. The “surprises” that kept blowing up my projects we

Picture this: You're the operations manager at a mid-sized electronics manufacturer. Business is booming, demand is unpredictable, and you're getting pressure from above to "automate something, anything!" The automation consultant shows up with a fancy presentation about a $2 million system that'll revolutionize your entire warehouse. It looks impressive, but there's one problem: it's designed for exactly what you're doing today, not what you might be doing in two years when

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