Analysts to Discuss Implications of Robot-Centric, AI-enabled Warehouses at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo
By 2030, 50% of new warehouses in developed markets will be designed as “robot-centric” facilities, with humans being optional, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
As warehouse workers become less willing to perform manual tasks, many organizations will be challenged to sustain operations through hiring alone, as labor costs and labor supply remain under significant pressure for most of the year. In response, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) are accelerating adoption of intralogistics smart robotics (ISRs) to scale operations as manual labor warehouse models become increasingly obsolete.
“AI continuously optimizes warehouse environments in real-time, shifting them from static structures into agile systems that adapt as demand changes,” said Abdil Tunca, Senior Principal Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “This changes how CSCOs think about designing warehouses for scalability, from settings that primarily rely on human labor to environments that maximize the ability to orchestrate robotic fleets.”
The ISR market is highly fragmented and will require most companies to adopt more than one type of robot and a multiagent orchestration platform to coordinate heterogenous fleets of robots. As robot adoption accelerates, organizations are moving beyond retrofitting traditional facilities with automation to designing new warehouse environments. In these modern warehouses, human labor is required only for exception handling, rather than serving as the foundation of daily operations. (....)