This story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Logistics Management as part of a broader roundtable on AI, automation, and supply chain innovation. In this piece, Gartnerâs Dwight Klappich explains why warehouse robotics adoption is lagging despite strong interest, whatâs fueling the slowdown, and how multi-agent orchestration platforms could reshape the future of automation.
LM: How would you realistically define the current robotics landscape inside todayâs logistics operations? What trends or challenges are shaping adoption right now?
Dwight Klappich: We continue to see strong interest in what Gartner refers to as intralogistics smart robots which are âthe class of smart robots that orchestrate and perform work within the four walls of a site and can be mobile or stationary, operating autonomously or collaboratively with humans or other robots.â
However, the actual growth of the market is relatively flat right now. On the demand side we continue to see strong intentions to pursue automation within logistics operations, with 93% of respondents to a Gartner study saying that they either have or plan to invest in cyber-physical automation over the next two years.
Specific to robots, the same study found that of those companies pursuing automation, 90% of respondents are in the process of deploying their first robots, with 8% already fully deployedâand only 2% with absolutely no plans to consider robotics over the next two years.
While the customer demand side remains strong, robotics market growth in terms of the numbers of new robotics customers, robotic sales revenues and numbers of robots deployed is slow and trailing expectations. We also hear from many vendors that sales cycles remain quite long, and vendors often say they feel trapped in never ending proofs of concept. From talking to vendors and customers we believe there are several reasons for this.
LM: Why do you believe that sales cycle remains so long?
Klappich: First, buyers lack the internal robotics expertise, so theyâre often learning as they go, and they have been forced to turn to the robotics vendors for most of their knowledge since consultants and systems integrators remain late to the robotics party.
This leads to long sales cycles as companies feel compelled to vet offerings extensively. However, the good news is that our research finds that once companies get over their first selection, 82% say they âplan to expand their fleet of robotsâ and 82% say they are âactively considering other robotics use cases.â And of that number, 42% say theyâre already pursuing new use cases.
LM: Since our last technology roundtable, how much progress have we made in the application of robotics?
Klappich: One encouraging thing we now see that we believe will help drive market growth, are robotics vendors now focusing on providing business solutions, not just robots. Initially, robot vendors offered a generic technology that might solve many problems, but it was largely up to the customer to figure out where, what, why and how robots would benefit their business.
Today, more and more robot providers are offering packaged business solutions such as truck loading or un-loading, parcel sortation and singulation, palletizing de-palletizing, order/case picking, collaborative picking or goods-to-person picking. By focusing on specific use cases and offering more packaged solutions robot vendors will help buyers target the most appropriate places to aim their evaluations and this will also help buyers with developing their investment business case.
LM: How is robotics adoption reshaping workforce strategies? Are companies shifting toward reskilling programs or new workforce models?
Klappich: Over the last three years I canât recall a single conversation with a customer that started with âweâre looking at robots to help us cut our work force by X%.â However, this doesnât mean that labor isnât still a major issue for logistics operations.
In the study mentioned above, we ask respondents what their primary motivation was for investing in robots. In this yearâs study, 52% of respondents said that it was due to rising labor costs, with 48% saying it was due to labor shortage. Three years ago, it was quite different, with only 41% saying it was due to rising labor costs, but 59% saying it was due to labor shortages.
What we believe from talking to customers is that companies continue to have many of the same issues with labor shortages, but they have been trying to pay their way out of this situation by offering higher hourly wages, signing bonuses and or incentive pay which have further led to rising labor costs.
More broadly speaking robotics has a positive impact on the operational work force and we are not finding employee resistance to the introduction of robotics. Again, as mentioned above, companies struggle to find enough people, and itâs hard to keep people for many mundane or taxing jobs in warehouses, such unloading trucks in Houston in July, or walking 11 kilometers a day as one of our clients told me each of their pickers does.
Consequently, from an operational standpoint, we have not seen organizations having to do much to their workforce to introduce robots.
LM: A few years ago, you described the emergence of âheterogeneous robotic fleets.â Could you define what that means in todayâs context? Has this vision materialized, and how are operations managing the complexity?
Klappich: We believe that over the next decade most medium to large companies will be operating heterogeneous fleets of robots in their warehouses, and as noted above, 87% of companies say that once they deploy their first robot, they plan to seek other robotics use cases.
By heterogenous fleet we mean a company will have multiple different kinds of robots from different vendors doing different things. One data point we have found is that over half of companies believe they will have 1 to 5 different types of robots in their warehouses over the next 3 years, and over 30% of companies said they will have over 5 different types of robot.
This is materializing and we actually now see that some material handling systems integrators are building businesses around helping companies deploy holistic robotic solutions comprised of different robots doing different things.
LM: With more facilities using robots from different vendors, how critical is interoperability? How are companies solving the challenge of multi-agent orchestration?
Klappich: If I have one robot from one vendor, interoperability is not a big issue nor is integration between my business applications and my robot platform. However, as you start to introduce more robots doing different things, interoperability becomes a big challenge.
Gartner has adopted the name âmulti-agent orchestration platformâ (MAOP) to describe the software layer that will integrate with and manage the work of a heterogeneous fleet of robots.
Originally, we called this âmulti-robot orchestration,â but we soon realized that for robots to effectively operate in the physical world they also need to talk to other things (agents) such as doors, elevators or conveyors so we expanded the name to multi-agent orchestration.
LM: Can you dig a little deeper on the capabilities of MAOP?
Klappich: There are various capabilities that comprise an MAOP. Integration is the first challenge. As the size and diversity of the fleet grows, being able to integrate to all of these becomes increasingly important. MAOP provides the ability to easily connect multiple robots/agents to the platform as well as the ability to seamlessly connect upstream to one or more business application.
Next, most robot platforms have their own fleet management software controlling the activities of their robots. However, once you have multiple robots from multiple vendors, you need something to help orchestration activities across the various robots. At a minimum they need to understand two physical objects cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time, but more importantly, the orchestration layer will control task interplay between various agents.
Next, once I can orchestrate work, the logical next step is to add optimization capabilities to enhance the decision-making process. Finally, just like most robot providers have their own fleet managers they also often have their own analytics. What customers would like is a single pane of glass where they can observe the work being done by all the robots to provide a holistic picture of the performance across the fleet of agents.
LM: What are some of the key benefits operations can realize once they successfully apply and optimize a heterogeneous robotic fleet?
Klappich: Historically, if you drew an automation continuum, it would start with nothing on the left and you would leap to extreme conventional automation on the right, and there was very little in the middle.
While large scale conventional automation is mature, proven and can, where appropriate, have strong value proposition, this comes at a high cost in time, money and effort. Robots bridge this gap, offering companies of all sizes the potential to get benefits from automation while maintaining the flexibility, scalability and adaptability of humans.
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