A robot named Sumay wanted to take a selfie with me.
It had a name tag. An actual name tag, the stick-on kind, the kind you wear at a church social or a networking event. "Hello, my name is Sumay." It was white and cheerful with little colored stripes, and Sumay held very still while I leaned in for the photo. It even had cartoon eyes on its screen face, the kind that curve upward like a smile.
That was Day Two at Automate 2026 in Chicago. North America's largest automation conference. McCormick Place. Tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of companies. Robots everywhere you looked, doing things robots could not do five years ago, three years ago, eighteen months ago.
I am a professional sword swallower. I co-run an event entertainment company. I am not an engineer. I am not an investor. I was here with my wife Ginger, who sees the technology, and I see the people. We walked the floor for a couple of days and I took notes on everything.
Here is what I found.
The Room Is Building Something It Has Not Yet Named
The first solo keynote speaker I heard, Pras Velagapudi, CTO of Agility Robotics, opened with a slide that said, "Congratulations. We live in the future."
He was not wrong. Another slide a few sessions later declared a new Space Race. Not Russia versus the United States this time. The whole world versus itself, with China and the US at the center of it. Jeff Cardenas of Apptronik put it plainly, "The companies that survive the robot boom will be the ones people trust." Not the ones with the most impressive demos. The ones people actually let into their workplaces. Their homes. Into their lives.
I kept thinking about that word. Trust. It is a human word. It is not a data word or a capability word. Nobody trusts a specification sheet. They trust a track record. They trust a person. They trust a company that has shown up, again and again, and done what it said it would do.
Evan Beard of Standard Bots announced that his company has made exactly zero dollars in service and support revenue. Not because the revenue model failed. Because the robots have not needed it. He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He put a new three-year warranty on all new purchases. Right there on the stage.
Aya Durbin of Boston Dynamics said the thing I keep coming back to, "Your robot will be the worst it will ever be on the day you receive it."
Read that again. The robot only gets better from the moment it arrives.
Behind Every Tech, There Is a Person
There was a table at one of the booths lined with robotic prosthetic hands. Purple ones, white ones, black ones, all different designs and grip configurations. People were leaning over them, touching them, trying to understand how they worked.
I thought about Aadeel Akhtar of Psyonic, who appeared at the conference fresh off Shark Tank. He told the story of a girl in Pakistan he saw as a young man, using a tree branch as a crutch. That image became his whole life's work. His prosthetics now let military amputees hold their children again.
Behind every bit of tech, there is a person.
I sat next to a Lockheed Martin engineer during a Siemens session about digital twinning. Siemens was explaining that with their technology, you can now train a robot for an entire factory in under a week. The engineer leaned over to me and said, quiet and dry, "A week? It takes two weeks just to get a purchase order approved."
That is not a technology problem. That is a human problem. Organizations move at the speed of their culture, not the speed of their software.
David Regar, CEO of Neura Robotics, stood on stage and made an argument I have not stopped thinking about. He said, "You can't learn to swim by watching videos. You can watch for years. It does not matter. Your nervous system has to go into the water. You have to feel it." The robots, he said, have the same problem. A brain alone is not enough. You need the reflexes. You need what he called the silicon nervous system.
The body has to learn, not just the mind.
I was texting with my Uncle Joe between sessions on day one. He is 78 years old. I told him what I was seeing. He texted: "Rather scary and amazing! In 10 years robots will be giving talks at conferences! In the 1990’s we had a speaker come to a Jones Conference and tell us by the year 2000 salespeople would no longer be needed at new home sales offices - people would just use computers! People want that personal experience!"
Uncle Joe was in real estate for almost 50 years.
The Question Nobody on Stage Was Asking
Every speaker I heard was smart. Most of them were brilliant. They talked about data collection methods, simulation training, egocentric video capture, supply chain lead times, safety standards, battery swap cycles. Jeff Cardenas talked about elder care as his long-term personal vision with the kind of quiet conviction that makes you believe him.
But here is what I noticed, sitting in those rooms: they are so deep inside the work that they have not yet figured out how to talk to the rest of us.
Robots are kept in work cells right now. There are entire booths on the floor selling fencing and barriers. Because a robot arm that cannot see you will swing around and hit you. It does not know you are there. The work cells are necessary. They are also a metaphor.
The people building this future are in their own work cell. They are moving fast, doing extraordinary things, and they are separated from the vast majority of humans who are going to have to live and work alongside what they are creating.
Six percent of US manufacturers currently use robots. Six percent.
Across eight thousand firms that did adopt robots, those companies posted one hundred fifty percent more jobs. Robots do not eliminate work. They change what work looks like. But that message has not reached the people standing in the warehouses watching the robots arrive, their body language not suggesting joy or awe.
The Bridge
Ginger and I went to this conference with an idea. I am not going to tell you what it is yet. That is a dispatch for another day.
What I will tell you is that it has to do with connecting the tech to the human, and every time we described it to someone on that floor, their face changed. Engineers. Executives. Investors. People who spend their days in data and deployment timelines and safety standards. People who have not thought about a general audience since they left home.
Every single one of them lit up.
Because they know this gap exists. The gap between what they are building and the people who are going to have to live alongside it. They feel it. They just have not had time to solve it. That is not their job. Their job is the robot.
Our job is different. We are not engineers. We are circus people. We are performers. We have spent our careers standing in the exact space between something unfamiliar and an audience that is not sure how to feel about it. We have watched people go from uncertain to delighted, again and again.
What Was Merely Emerging, Is Now Essential
The first Humanoid Robot Forum a few years ago in Memphis drew 200 people. The second in Seattle drew 300.
This one, at Automate 2026 in Chicago, drew thousands.
Something shifted. The conversations I heard were not theoretical. Companies are deploying robots in real facilities doing real work. Boston Dynamics has Atlas sequencing car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia right now. Agility Robotics posts time-lapse videos of Digit running uninterrupted shifts at customer sites.
This is not a demonstration anymore. It is the beginning of something.
I keep coming back to the deep end of the pool. We are fine in the shallow water. We can splash around. We have been watching robots dance on the internet for years and have mostly found it amusing. But the water is getting deeper. The robots are moving out of the work cells. They are learning to navigate the same spaces we do, see what we see, carry what we carry.
And the lifeguards, as I wrote in my notes on the trip home, are not all in position yet.
My Upcoming Book
I came to Automate because I am writing a book calledWielding Humanity: Staying Human in a World That Keeps Automating. It was not supposed to be my next book. But I had a client hire me to speak at a workforce summit that wanted me to talk about the intersection of tech and AI with my work on Sincerity. So I did what I do, and I turned left.
At the conference, I came to understand what the people building this future actually believe, in their own words, in rooms where they were talking to each other rather than to the public.
What I found is that the most important conversation happening inside that conference is not about legs versus wheels, or data collection methods, or battery architecture. It is about what it means to be human in a world that is actively, rapidly, sincerely trying to figure out which human tasks it no longer needs humans to do.
That question is not going away. It is getting louder.
And the answer is not a protest sign or a purchase order or a policy paper. It is a deeper understanding of what we actually bring to this that no robot, no matter how much data it has trained on, can replicate.
That is what I am writing about. And it starts right here.
Wielding Humanityis coming very soon. If you want to follow the dispatches as I write it, subscribe to this newsletter. If you want to bring this conversation to your organization before the robots arrive, reach out.
To the hilt,
-JR
Joshua Routh is a Certified Speaking Professional, one of fewer than 100 professional sword swallowers in the world, and the author of The "S" Word: Wielding Sincerity in a World of Performance. He speaks on sincerity, collaboration, and human connection for associations, corporations, and conferences across industries. His keynotes include Complaint Free Workplace: Turning Complainers into Collaborators, The S Word: Wielding Sincerity in a World of Performance, and Wielding Humanity: Staying Human, Trusted, and Connected in the Age of AI.
