Warehouses Buy Robots and Hire Workers at Once

The story of warehouse robots has mostly been told as a replacement story: machines taking over jobs people used to do. The actual numbers this year tell a different one. North American warehouses ordered nearly 18,000 robots worth roughly $1.2 billion in the first half of 2026, with the value of those orders growing more than three times faster than the number of units purchased: unit orders climbed 2%-unit while order value jumped 7%, the Wall Street Journal reported. That gap signals warehouses may be buying more capable, software-heavy robotic systems rather than simply adding identical units.

That robot spending is not translating into fewer job openings. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that job openings in the combined transportation, warehousing and utilities sector rose by 97,000 in June, one of the largest monthly increases across any industry tracked, according to the agency’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

Robots Are Filling Gaps a Short-Staffed Industry Already Had

Warehousing has struggled with a persistent labor problem robots are only beginning to address. Seventeen percent of warehouse and storage workers are age 55 or older, according to a 2024 BLS report. According to June 2026 JOLTS data, the turnover in this sector also runs at 3.8%, well above the rate in most other sectors, forcing employers into near-constant hiring and retraining cycles that eat into productivity even when a facility is fully staffed on paper.

An Association for Advancing Automation (A3) member survey found 94% of companies expect either significant or moderate growth in 2026, with only 5% anticipating a flat or declining year, according to a May report from automation technology provider Symbotic. This suggests the industry’s underlying demand for both labor and automation is rising together rather than one substituting for the other.

That combination points to a specific, narrower role for robots in the near term: absorbing the most repetitive, physically demanding or hard-to-staff tasks, the same ones warehouses have struggled to keep filled with human workers regardless of wage or benefits offered. Meanwhile, people continue to handle the judgment-heavy work robots cannot reliably do. A warehouse adding both machines and headcount at the same time is not choosing between the two. It is treating them as two different answers to the same underlying capacity problem, one that has outpaced what either labor supply or automation could solve on its own.

Food and Logistics Companies Are Now Driving Robot Demand

The kind of robots warehouses are buying has shifted. Non-automotive sectors including food, consumer goods and logistics now account for a growing share of total robot demand, and companies are increasingly purchasing integrated systems that combine robots with advanced orchestration software rather than standalone machines, according to industry trends published in June by MTLI Group. As warehouses deploy robots from multiple vendors inside the same facility, the software layer that coordinates every robot’s movements and hands off tasks between them has become the central operational challenge.

“No Roadmap, No Problem: How Enterprises Are Reinventing the AI Workforce,” a PYMNTS Intelligence report based on a survey of 60 CFOs at U.S. companies generating at least $1 billion in annual revenue, found companies are not choosing cleanly between automation and hiring. Half of CFOs surveyed said they expect artificial intelligence to create new roles requiring new skills, even as 47% separately said they expect it to significantly reduce headcount elsewhere in their organizations. Only 34% cited increased output as the top reason for adopting AI in the first place, suggesting the workforce effects of automation are running in multiple directions inside the same company at once. That mixed picture matches what is playing out on warehouse floors: robots and hiring both climbing, for now.