Automation Trends to Watch in 2026: From Rapid Adoption to Practical Balance
As we enter 2026, the warehouse automation industry looks quite different than it was just a few years ago. Several years have passed since COVID, a period that accelerated the long-standing labor shortages, disrupted supply chains, and a wave of fast, sometimes feverish, automation decisions. Many companies rushed to automate wherever possible, just to keep things moving. Those years also saw the rapid rise of new mobile technologies. AMRs, ACRs, and other flexible systems entered the market rapidly.
Now, as the industry moves into 2026, the focus is changing. This is a year of coming to terms with new technologies, understanding their strengths and limits, and finding the right place for each of them within a broader automation portfolio. Rather than chasing novelty, companies are looking for balance between scale and flexibility, investment and return, and innovation and operational stability. The trends below reflect how this balance is being applied across different warehouse models and processes.
Large Distribution Centers: Scale, Throughput, and Stability
Large centralized warehouses will remain a major driver of automation investment in 2026, but their role is evolving. Many operators are consolidating multiple nodes and regional hubs into fewer, larger fulfillment or distribution centers to better balance resources across their logistics networks. By concentrating volume in larger facilities, companies can redistribute labor more efficiently and improve utilization of truck fleets. Automation in these environments emphasizes stability, predictability, and long-term cost efficiency. High-capacity AS/RS, shuttle systems, and sortation systems remain core technologies, selected for their ability to handle sustained throughput with minimal disruption.
In this way, large fulfilment centers act as balancing points—absorbing volume variability while providing a stable backbone for increasingly complex distribution structures.
Micro-Fulfilment Centers: Automation for Supermarkets
Micro-fulfilment centers follow a different logic and serve a specific purpose: supermarket and general merchandise order fulfilment. These compact automated facilities are typically attached to supermarkets and large retail stores, supporting online grocery and GM orders and enabling fast, last-mile fulfillment with short lead times. This model is gaining traction primarily in specific markets such as the United States, parts of India, and other regions where same-day or rapid grocery delivery is a strong consumer expectation and where labor and real estate dynamics support the business case.
Mobile Robotics: Finding Their Natural Role
Mobile robotics will continue to grow in 2026, but the tone has clearly changed. The excitement around “robots everywhere” has settled, and expectations are more realistic.
AMRs and ACRs have shown their value in frontline picking tasks. They are particularly useful where layouts change frequently or where automation needs to be introduced step by step. However, experience has shown that they are not the best answer for every operation. In many cases, mobile robots are selected primarily to reduce upfront investment, rather than to address all operational pain points through automation.
As a result, hybrid systems are becoming the norm. Mobile robots are combined with fixed automation such as AS/RS, each used where it performs best. A major theme for 2026 is the smooth integration of new robotic systems into existing warehouses, both physically and at the software level. The goal is not replacement, but coexistence.
Phased Growth as a New Industry Standard
Uncertainty in demand remains a reality, and customers continue to favor automation that can grow in phases. Modular systems are no longer a “nice to have”; they are often a requirement.
In addition to mobile robotics, flexible and scalable AS/RS solutions such as four-way shuttle solutions illustrate this shift well. Compared to older deep-lane storage solutions, four-way shuttle technology enables significantly higher throughput while maintaining high storage density. This allows dense storage concepts to be applied to operations that also require strong performance.
These systems remain best suited for projects with a limited number of SKUs and large volumes per item. Their modular nature allows storage capacity and throughput to be increased gradually by extending storage blocks or adding shuttles up to a certain number. In 2026, this balance of density, performance, and scalability keeps four-way shuttle systems very much in the picture.
Piece Picking: Closing in on Full Automation
Piece picking continues to be one of the most challenging areas of warehouse automation, and 2026 will see further change driven by the push toward full automation.
Goods-to-person solutions are becoming the primary model. Traditional manual in-aisle picking, with operators walking long distances, is steadily disappearing in new projects. Instead, products are delivered directly to picking stations.
At these stations, people are selectively being replaced by robots, where item characteristics and order profiles allow stable operation. Despite recent technological advances, projects fully handled by robotic piece picking remain limited worldwide, underscoring the complexity of this task.
Automated Mixed Case Palletizing and Automated Loading Are Moving into the Spotlight
Mixed palletizing, especially for supermarket distribution, is no longer viewed as a special solution. It is becoming a standard requirement.
A key enabler is the integration of AS/RS with palletizing systems, where cartons are released in the correct sequence to build stable, store-ready pallets.
Automated loading is also receiving strong attention. This includes both floor loading of cartons directly into trucks and automated loading of pallets. Like piece picking, loading has traditionally been one of the last manual operations in the warehouse. In 2026, more customers are actively targeting these areas to close some of the last open gaps in automation, but most still rely on hybrid or semi-automated solutions to keep investment and risk under control, reflecting that hybrid models define today’s and tomorrow’s reality, while fully automated warehouses remain a more distant goal.
AI and the Early Steps Toward Self-Managing Warehouses
AI-driven technologies are slipping into logistics operations across a broad range of areas. At the WMS level, companies are introducing AI-based slotting strategies for AS/RS based on order history and pick correlations. When AS/RS interfaces with AMRs, AI supports dynamic task assignment by factoring in real-time congestion, battery status, and downstream capacity. In maintenance, machine-learning models predict equipment failures using sensor data. In vision systems, AI is now central to exception handling during palletizing and depalletizing. These applications operate largely in the background, improving throughput, availability, and decision speed without changing how operators interact with the system.
Humanoid Robots: The Experimental Phase
Humanoid robots, introduced by several Chinese and US startups, will continue to attract attention, but their role in 2026 will remain limited to pilot projects and evaluation. Deployment will focus on testing potential rather than solving immediate operational needs, with broader adoption expected only in later years.
Looking Ahead
Overall, 2026 feels like a year of balance in warehouse automation. After years of rapid experimentation and fast adoption, the industry is moving into a more pragmatic phase. Automation decisions are increasingly shaped by operational fit rather than technological novelty. Across fulfilment centers, robotics, storage systems, and picking and loading processes, the common theme is balanced automation—the right level of automation for each task and the integration of the most suitable technologies for each operation. In this sense, 2026 is less about accelerating change and more about making automation work where it truly belongs.
Mamiko Ito
Global Sales Strategy Department, Intralogistics Business
Raised in Japan and the United States, Mamiko joined Daifuku in 2023 and has since worked with our Group companies and our Spain-based partner company ULMA Handling Systems to deliver Daifuku’s intralogistics solutions across Europe and Latin America. She specializes in international sales and partnership development, driving innovative solutions for global clients.
