The Best Automation Advice Isn’t in a Vendor Deck

For about two years now, a warehouse leader at one distributor on ASA's Innovation Summit robotics panel has been calling another panelist with automation questions. No program set it up. One calls, the other picks up, and the answer is usually some version of “here’s what we did, consider this.” A third panelist wanted to see what a mature deployment looked like and didn’t book a vendor demo. He drove to the other operator’s facility and spent a full day walking it.

ASA spent this spring and summer preparing that panel, sitting down with each operator to capture his story before anyone writes a run of show. The preparation itself made the argument for the event. These operators already knew pieces of each other’s stories because they had been trading them privately for years. At one point two participants discovered, mid-conversation, that they were working with the same integrator on nearly identical systems, half a country apart. Neither had any idea.

The most useful information in this industry right now is not in a vendor deck or a database. It lives with operators who have already made the decisions, and it moves one phone call at a time, mostly by accident.

One panelist, a manufacturer, went with collaborative robots instead of a fully automated system for a reason a spec sheet would never surface: his picking operation is broken case, and pulling one item out of a box still takes human dexterity. His crew helped design the process from the start, which he credits for an implementation that beat its ROI case by about 20 percent within six months. Asked what a company would need in place before replicating it, he didn’t hesitate: “Excellent data. You will end up relying on weights and dims and all of that. So data, data, data, data.”

Another panelist runs distribution for a multi-branch wholesaler that compressed what took 20,000 square feet of its old facility into 7,000. The automated storage system holds under a third of the company’s SKUs but handles half of all picks. The business case projected a four to five year payback; they hit it in three. And when no provider in the area knew how to maintain the robots, they trained two of their own diesel mechanics to do it. The hard lesson was quieter: case dimensions loaded where each dimensions should have been, which kept totes from filling the way they should. A second automation project missed its ROI because the assumptions underneath it were wrong. “That one might be a live-and-learn for us,” he said. You will not find that sentence in a brochure.

A third panelist is mid-journey, which makes his view different and just as valuable. His company’s ERP started decades ago with 35,000 part numbers. It now holds 660,000. In recent years the file grew by 26,000 part numbers a year, and 90 percent of them never sold a thing. Before any robot shows up, his team purged 170,000 dead records, and search got better for 300 users overnight. He also hired two design firms for the same building instead of one, and their layouts came back more than 30 percent apart in square footage. One of them would have left the company undersized by year two.

Those lessons cost real money to learn, and the industry has no reliable way to pass them around. In both of ASA’s Applied AI surveys, run last fall and again in April, the top request from members was peer case studies and success stories, and the share asking for them grew from roughly a third to nearly half. Members are not asking for more content. They are asking to talk to the person who already did the thing they are about to attempt.

Right now, that conversation depends on luck. It happens if you happen to have the right cell number, or if your integrator happens to mention another distributor mid-meeting. The operators above found each other through personal connections built over years. Most members do not have those connections yet.

The Innovation Summit is ASA putting that exchange on the calendar instead of leaving it to chance. It runs November 9 and 10 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, right before NETWORK2026 at the same property. Chad Foster keynotes on leading through the current wave of change. Spencer X. Smith works customer intelligence as an organizational capability. Steve Lerch takes AI from experimentation to execution. Then the operators behind the stories above take the stage together for the robotics and automation panel, with the follow-up questions asked live. The event closes with facilitated roundtables built so attendees leave with the thing the surveys say they want most: people to call.

The panelists needed two years of phone calls to build their network. You can get a working start on yours in two days. Registration is $500, or $250 as an add-on to NETWORK2026, at asa.net/Innovation-Summit.

By Nils Swenson