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.

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.

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

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

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

The short answer: Humanoids might be the answer to labor at some point, but not today. Today, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are the ROI move. While the tech giants pilot bipedal robots for general-purpose tasks, mid-market businesses are winning right now by deploying flexible, specialized equipment like Milvus AMRs to solve immediate material flow challenges. It is May 2026. If you follow the tech headlines, you’ve seen the videos. Tesla’s Optimus Gen 3 is folding laundry

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

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