McCormick Place hosted over 50,000 people and more than 1,000 exhibitors for four days of robots, AI and automation hardware that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. Humanoid robots had their own pavilion. FANUC showed off natural language programming that lets operators talk to a robot instead of coding it. There was a Startup Challenge, a Humanoid Robot Forum, and enough autonomous mobile robots rolling around the floor to make you wonder if McCormick Place needs its own traffic laws.

It was an extraordinary showcase of what automation can now do. What it didn’t spend much time on was who’s going to build, deploy, and run all of it.

That’s the gap Kensington360 lives in. While the show floor sold the vision, we spend our time with the hiring managers who have to deliver it, and the same conversation keeps coming up regardless of sector: the technology is moving faster than the talent pipeline that’s supposed to support it.

The skills gap was the show’s quiet subplot

Every exhibitor at Automate was, in some sense, selling a solution to a labour problem. Cobots exist because line operators are hard to find. AMRs exist because warehouse headcount is hard to scale. Machine vision and AI-driven inspection exist because skilled quality inspectors are retiring faster than they’re being replaced. The entire event was a monument to the idea that automation fills the gap left by people.

But automation creates its own people problem. Every robot cell needs an integrator who can commission it and keep it running, every AMR fleet needs maintenance and controls engineers who understand the floor it operates on, every AI-enabled inspection system still needs a skilled quality engineer who can validate its outputs and stand behind them in an audit. The more sophisticated the hardware on the show floor got, the more specialised and scarcer the engineering talent required to run it becomes.

If you’re a hiring manager who walked the aisles this year, the question worth asking each vendor isn’t just “what does this do?” It’s “who on my team is going to own this once it’s installed?”

What we saw in Chicago

A few threads from this year’s show are particularly relevant to anyone building automation and robotics teams right now:

Natural language programming doesn’t remove the engineer, it changes what they do. FANUC’s push to let operators guide robots with voice commands got a lot of attention on the floor, and the headlines framed it as automation getting “easier.” For hiring managers, the real story is different: it lowers the bar for day-to-day operation but raises the bar for the integrators and controls engineers who design the cell, manage the edge cases, and keep it running when something goes wrong. You still need the deep technical bench. You just need fewer people doing rote programming and more people who can troubleshoot a system that’s partly making its own decisions.

Humanoids moved from research project to commercial roadmap. A dedicated pavilion with 20+ humanoid robots and a third annual forum confirmed this isn’t a novelty act anymore. For manufacturing and logistics employers, that means a new category of mechanical, electrical, and controls engineering roles is forming right now around mobile manipulation and humanoid integration — and the companies that move early on hiring will have a real head start over those who wait until it’s on the production line.

AMRs and intralogistics are scaling past the pilot stage. Industry surveys point to robotics adoption moving into the mainstream in warehousing and distribution, with faster deployments and broader use cases. That’s good news for automation vendors, but it’s a direct hiring signal too: fleet management, systems integration, and maintenance roles around AMRs are no longer one-off pilot hires, they’re becoming permanent headcount.

The Right to Win conversation

We work across additive manufacturing, robotics and AI, aerospace and defence, MedTech, calibration and metrology, machine tools, and advanced manufacturing — which means we see the same hiring pressure show up in different costumes depending on the sector. The names and job titles change. The underlying scarcity doesn’t.

What we’d say to any hiring manager who attended Automate this year: the technology decisions get made on the show floor, but the talent decisions get made months before and after. If your roadmap includes new automation capability in the next 12 months, the conversation about who’s going to run it should be happening now, not after the PO is signed.

Let’s talk

Kensington360 followed Automate 2026 closely, and we’d welcome the chance to talk shop with anyone wrestling with the build-vs-buy-vs-hire question for their automation and robotics teams. If you attended and want to compare notes on what you saw on the floor versus what you’re seeing in your applicant pipeline, get in touch — we’d genuinely like to hear it.

Kensington360 (K360) is a specialist Industry 4.0 recruitment firm covering additive manufacturing, robotics and AI, aerospace and defence, MedTech, calibration and metrology, machine tools, and advanced manufacturing across the UK and USA.