Automate 2025: A Field Report from Detroit

When your job is to scout the next big leap in industrial automation and robotics, there’s one place you need to be each spring: Automate. So earlier this month our team swapped Santiago’s fall drizzle for Detroit’s industrial buzz and joined nearly 40,000 automation die-hards and 800-plus exhibitors under the roof of Huntington Place. It was equal parts tech show, reunion, and crystal ball - and it gave our team at güil Mobility Ventures the clarity we needed on where to double-down (and where to chill) in 2025.

🎯Why Automate matters

Automate isn’t just another trade show, it’s North America’s largest convergence of manufacturing automation, industrial robotics, and AI-powered production tech. For an investor-operator like güil, the show is a live dashboard: we see what’s shipping, what’s vaporware, and who’s quietly eating everyone’s lunch. This year, our goal was simple:

✅ Scout practical automation for warehouses and factories.

✅Track the humanoid hype cycle (spoiler: still early for real deployments).

✅¿Build relationships with solution vendors that are eyeing Latin America but haven’t set foot there -yet.

🔍 Show-Floor Highlights:

1️⃣ Modular & plug-and-play everything

From Universal Robots’ snap-together cobot cells to German newcomers pitching robot-as-LEGO, the winning message was: “Configure in hours, not quarters.” For high-mix, low-volume plants, that flexibility is gold.

2️⃣ AI inside—finally useful

If 2024 was the year everyone said “we’re adding AI,” 2025 is the year they actually shipped it. Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) from MiR and OTTO now dynamically re-route around humans in real time, thanks to on-board vision models. Vision stacks for quality inspection were everywhere, too—no data-science PhD required.

3️⃣ Digital twins grow up

Siemens and NVIDIA demoed drag-and-drop simulations that mirror your factory’s traffic and energy loads. The ROI pitch: model a layout change today, avoid a million-dollar headache tomorrow. We’re bullish—especially for brown-field warehouses in LATAM that can’t afford trial-and-error upgrades.

4️⃣ Market value of sustainability

Low-power actuators, energy-recuperating drives, and dashboards that translate kilowatt savings into carbon metrics were crowd-pleasers. When energy costs keep climbing, green isn’t just PR—it’s P&L.

🤖 What Automate is not (yet)

Humanoids drew swarms of phones—Agility’s Digit kicked boxes like a champ—but honest conversations with integrators confirmed our hunch: the business cases are still cooking. Same goes for anything consumer-facing. Automate is a playground for industrial and logistics use-cases; if you’re building a home robot butler, CES or IFA is your show.

💡3 Key Takeaways for Operators & Investors:

1️⃣ Hardware is crowded; software is leverage. More than a dozen AMR vendors look eerily similar. Fleet orchestration layers, safety “guardrails,” and no-code robot-OS platforms, on the other hand, felt differentiated and sticky.​
2️⃣ Latin America is greenfield. Multiple vendors admitted they have zero channel coverage south of Texas.

3️⃣ Speed wins in 2025. Everyone—from tier-one automotive to mom-and-pop machine shops—talked about time-to-value. Integrators that can deliver a robot cell in weeks, not months, will own the budget conversa­tion.

🏭 A quick love letter to Detroit

Beyond the convention center we toured New Lab @ Michigan Central, Ford’s renovated Book Depository turned hardware playground. Picture 3-D printers, drone cages, and enough machine tools to make a VC drool. For us, it underscored how Midwest manufacturing muscle plus fresh capital equals real momentum—worth another visit soon.

✈️ Who should book for 2026?

✔️ Plant managers chasing cycle-time gains without ripping out entire lines.

✔️Supply-chain and warehouse directors are tired of forklift traffic jams.

✔️Systems integrators searching for reliable sub-systems and partners.

✔️ Investors hunting B2B robotics software with clear paths to revenue.

❌ If you’re building a consumer pet robot—or hoping to meet the next Atlas-level humanoid—save your airfare.

🧠 Final Thoughts

Automate 2025 validated our thesis: industrial automation is moving from ‘why’ to ‘how fast.’ For güil Mobility Ventures, that means sharpening our focus on software-defined robotics, warehouse mobility, and the tooling that makes integration painless.

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Güil Research Lab.

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💬 Curious to chat about industrial automation or explore LATAM opportunities? Let’s connect! #Automate2025 #IndustrialRobotics #Automation #Industry40 #WarehouseTech #MobilityInnovation #güilventures #LATAMtech