Two of the older names in warehouse automation made their biggest platform moves in years during the 2025-2026 window, and they did basically the same thing. Both stopped selling mechanics and started selling orchestration.
Dematic: a factory expansion plus a command center
In January 2026 Dematic kicked off a 150 million dollar expansion of its Grand Rapids manufacturing site. Two months later, at MODEX 2026, they launched the Dematic Command Center. The interesting part of the Command Center isn't that it exists. It's that it's vendor-agnostic, meaning it's designed to run heterogeneous fleets, not just Dematic-built equipment. For a traditional systems integrator, that's a material strategy change.
KNAPP: an award-winning product plus a software layer
KNAPP's story has two pieces. AeroBot picked up an award at LogiMAT 2025 for its airborne storage approach, and the reference installation at Siemens' Karlsruhe plant now runs 21 AeroBot units across 30,000 storage locations on 27 levels, throughputting 280 moves per hour. That's a serious reference.
Then at MODEX 2026 they launched KNAPP Brain, described as the first AI layer for digital value chains. Same idea as Dematic Command Center: move up the stack from equipment supplier to orchestration platform while the heterogeneous-fleet market is still wide open.
The equipment is becoming commoditised. The orchestration layer is where margin will live for the next decade.
What this means on the buying side
If you're specifying a new system in 2026, the question isn't "which vendor's racking and conveyors are best?" any more. It's "whose orchestration layer can run the mixed fleet I'm going to end up with?" That's a genuinely different conversation.
The customers who win from this will be the ones who refuse to lock into a proprietary WES early and instead pick an orchestration platform that can evolve as their equipment mix evolves. The vendors betting on that future are the ones making serious platform investments right now. Dematic and KNAPP are both in that camp, and they've been joined by LocusONE from the AMR side. The three-way race for the orchestration layer is the part of 2026 I keep watching.