MODEX 2026: What We're Watching in Atlanta

MODEX lands every two years, and this one arrives at a genuinely strange moment. AI investment is outpacing most organizations' readiness for it. Tariffs are reshaping where product lives. And the labor market still hasn't delivered the relief operators were promised. Fifty thousand supply chain professionals are heading to Atlanta next week. Here's what we expect the real conversations to be about.

AI has a data problem nobody wants to talk about

‍Every signal heading into MODEX points to AI dominating the week, not as a future concept, but as a present-tense operational pressure. The industry has largely moved past debating adoption. The harder question is why so many organizations well past the pilot stage still can't point to measurable floor impact. The answer most vendors on the show floor won't volunteer: the physical data feeding those systems doesn't reflect reality. When a pallet is misplaced, a shipment arrives damaged without being logged, or a forklift drops a load in the wrong slot because the assigned location was full, the system is already behind. Every AI layer built on top of that picture is optimizing against something that doesn't exist. We expect this to be the subtext of nearly every AI conversation at MODEX, even if nobody calls it that.

Volatility is making real-time ground truth a strategic requirement

‍Tariff policy is reshaping sourcing patterns, de minimis is gone, and inventory is being repositioned across networks at a pace where the data trail rarely keeps up with the floor. Organizations are making consequential decisions, where to hold stock, how to slot for surge, how to serve clients through uncertainty, on operational pictures that are already stale by the time they're acted on. The operators who handle this environment best won't be the ones with the most automation. They'll be the ones who know what's actually on their floor, continuously, across every facility in their network.

The labor conversation is missing half the problem

‍Automation is being positioned across this show floor as the primary answer to warehouse labor challenges. Some of that is warranted. But the labor costs most operators aren't measuring are the ones created by bad data: the hours spent on manual cycle counts, the headcount pulled off fulfillment to go locate missing product, the teams rebuilding chargeback cases because nobody has photographic proof of what shipped. Expect labor to be a dominant theme at MODEX, but expect the physical data angle to be underrepresented.

We'll be at Booth #A4518 and presenting on Wednesday 4/15 on "How Barrett Distribution Centers Maximized Order Fulfillment Performance with AI-Enabled Machine Vision". If these are the conversations you're coming to Atlanta to have, come visit us.