What Warehouse Operators Are Actually Automating in 2026 — Process by Process

A process-level view of what warehouse operators are automating today, what remains manual, and the buyer priorities shaping investment decisions.

Trade media and the vendors themselves both tend to describe 2026 as the year warehouses “went autonomous.” The more useful question for anyone planning a capital budget is narrower: which processes are actually being automated today, which are still left manual, and what is driving the decision either way? One recent industry survey gives a concrete, process-level answer.

The source

The data below comes from the 2026 Automation Study, based on a survey of more than 120 materials-handling purchasing decision-makers conducted by the Peerless Research Group (PRG), as reported by Modern Materials Handling (mmh.com).

Automation is real, but uneven

Full automation remains a minority practice, and it varies sharply by process. Respondents report full automation rates of: labeling 24%, reporting 18%, packaging 13%, picking 12%, storage 11%, conveyance 10%, replenishment 9%, and retrieval just 3%. Put differently, roughly a third of respondents say picking (33%) and retrieval (31%) are still mostly or fully manual, with no plans to automate them. Storage and packaging sit at 30% manual-with-no-plans each.

This is a useful counterweight to the idea that warehouses are rapidly becoming “lights-out” operations. The processes most resistant to automation — picking and retrieval — are also the two most operationally complex and the most dependent on variable SKU handling.

Looking ahead, however, planned investment is broad-based: across the equipment categories tracked, a majority of respondents who don’t already use conveyor and sortation (51%), goods-to-person picking (51%), weighing, cubing and dimensioning (57%), and pocket sortation (59%) plan to deploy or upgrade within the next two years. That suggests the gap between “automated” and “manual” is expected to narrow meaningfully over the next two years, even if 2026 itself is not a tipping-point year.

What’s driving the investment

Two drivers stand out in the survey. First, scale: average workforce per facility rose to 1,095 employees, up from 862 the year before — larger operations, more throughput, more pressure on manual processes. Second, persistent labor availability problems are cited as a key driver of automation investment, consistent with difficulty finding and retaining reliable distribution-center staff.

At the market level, PRG’s data puts global investment in warehouse automation at roughly $21 billion in 2023, projected to exceed $90 billion by 2033 — a more than fourfold increase, spread across a full decade. Average planned 2026 spend per respondent organization is $1.6 million, up modestly from $1.5 million in 2025; 31% expect spending to increase, 43% expect it to hold steady, and only 3% expect a decrease.

Buyers are cautious, not bedazzled

Perhaps the clearest signal in the survey is what decision-makers say they actually weigh when evaluating automation purchases, and it is not a technology arms race. Total cost of ownership, ROI and maintenance costs are rated very important by 77% of respondents. Purchase price itself is rated very important by 78%, up sharply from 61% the year before — buyers are getting more price-sensitive, not less. Fast service response is now considered essential by 95% (up from 83%), parts availability and obsolescence risk by 74%, integration with existing equipment by 68% (up from 56%), and scalability by 59% (up from 42%).

Read together, these numbers describe a buyer who is automating selectively, under real cost discipline, and increasingly worried about being locked into a system that can’t be serviced, integrated or scaled later — not a buyer chasing automation for its own sake.

What this means for decision-makers

For anyone evaluating an automation investment in the years ahead, this survey suggests a few practical questions are worth asking any vendor, regardless of technology: what is the realistic TCO over the equipment’s service life, not just the purchase price; what is the actual parts-availability and service-response commitment; how well does the system integrate with what’s already on the floor; and how does the solution scale if volume or facility size changes. These are exactly the criteria PRG’s respondents say are rising in importance year over year.

Sources

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