More than 90,000 attendees passed through McCormick Place in Chicago last month for the International Manufacturing Technology Show, the biennial event billed as the largest manufacturing trade show in the Western Hemisphere.

Industry suppliers used the floor to showcase robotics, industrial artificial intelligence, machining and additive manufacturing. Kawada Robotics demonstrated Fillie, a stationary, dual-arm humanoid upper-body robot aimed at light automation and research and development tasks.

Several themes emerged from sessions and exhibitor interviews conducted at the show.

Microfactories move the playbook. Small, modular facilities are combining robotics, additive manufacturing and advanced technologies to attack long lead times for parts and components. Caracol showed an additive manufacturing robot that automates component fabrication, part of a broader push toward distributed, smaller-footprint production.

Four pillars for automation. Sven Diedrich, head of digital transformation and business solutions at Pinaxis, told attendees that "people, processes, data and systems" are the essential elements of any automation strategy. His framing points to a persistent gap between robot purchases and the organizational groundwork needed to make them productive.

Demand is real, and labor is driving it. Chris Chidzik, principal economist at AMT, the association that owns IMTS, said demand for automation is "off the charts" due in part to the manufacturing labor shortage. AI is also driving major demand for power transmission and electrical equipment, Chidzik said, a secondary effect worth tracking for suppliers in those tiers.

AI moves from pitch to presumption. Executives from Fanuc America, Honeywell Technologies, Generac and Briggs & Stratton, joined by leaders from Google Cloud, discussed the current impacts and future of artificial intelligence in industrial settings. One forecast from the panel carried a blunt headline: "We're going to stop talking about AI." The implication is that AI functionality is becoming embedded in standard equipment rather than marketed as a differentiator — a shift OEM procurement teams will notice in quoting cycles.

The show's timing matters for capacity planners. With automation demand running hot and AI-related equipment orders pulling on power transmission supply chains, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers face capital-allocation decisions that will shape competitiveness through the next model cycles. AMT's economic read, based on association data, gives the demand claims some grounding beyond vendor marketing — but equipment lead times and integration capacity, not orders alone, will determine how quickly plants can act.

What to watch next: whether microfactory deployments translate into measurable lead-time reductions in production networks, whether AMT's order data sustains the automation surge into 2027, and how quickly the labor shortage tightens further — the variable Chidzik identified as a root driver of current demand.