Paul D’Arrigo

At MODEX 2026 in Atlanta, Scott Luton sat down with Josh Cloer, General Manager, North America for Nomagic, to discuss the next phase of warehouse robotics and the growing role of AI-driven automation inside modern fulfillment operations. While transportation costs and economic uncertainty continue to pressure supply chains globally, Cloer sees a major opportunity emerging inside the four walls of the warehouse.   The Next Wave of Warehouse Investment According to Cloer, many organizations spent the last decade investing heavily in core warehouse infrastructure: automated storage systems, shuttles, and tote-moving technologies. Now, the focus is shifting toward connecting and expanding those systems. “What they’re moving forward with now is doing the rest of their warehouse,” Cloer explains. That includes: automated forklifts, robotic picking systems, mobile robots and AI-driven item handling. At the same time, smaller operators that may not have justified large-scale automation investments in the past are increasingly turning to more flexible robotic solutions. This evolution reflects a broader industry trend: warehouse automation is no longer reserved only for massive enterprises. More scalable and adaptable technologies are opening the door for a wider range of operators.   A Different Approach to Robotics One of the most interesting parts of…

written by Nick Gospodinov, Founder & CEO of Mandel AI   There is a dirty secret in supply chain management: the most critical information about your orders, delays, and supplier commitments doesn’t live in your ERP. It lives in email. Not in dashboards. Not in control towers. In inboxes. Ask any procurement manager what they do first thing in the morning, and the answer is almost always the same: open Outlook, start scrolling. A supplier confirmed a ship date in a reply chain. A freight forwarder flagged a delay in an attachment. A pricing update came through as a PDF buried in a thread from two weeks ago. This is the real operating system of supply chain, and it has no search, no alerts, no reconciliation, and no memory.   The Coordination Gap No One Talks About The supply chain technology market has poured billions into planning, visibility, and execution systems. These tools work when the data is clean, structured, and already inside the system. The problem is that the most operationally critical information never makes it there in time. Manufacturers and distributors manage hundreds, sometimes thousands, of supplier relationships. Each one generates a constant stream of unstructured communication: order…