Exotec survey finds 94% of warehouse robot buyers say switching costs too much

In an Exotec survey of supply chain leaders, 94% said moving to another provider would be prohibitively costly. That means most buyers are tied to the system they picked for 10 to 15 years. One in four said they wish they had gone a different way.

Exotec, a global warehouse robotics provider, released the report in Atlanta on October 28, 2026. It is titled Avoid Robot Regret, with the subtitle What Separates Automation That Delivers from Automation That Disappoints, and the company frames its findings as a gap between what buyers expect from automation and what they actually get. The report links disappointment to three choices buyers make before installation begins: how they estimated lifetime cost, who they put in charge of fixing problems, and whether the operation was ready for the system.

Put those two findings side by side and the stakes become clear. If the decisions that drive regret all happen before installation, and switching afterward is too expensive for nearly everyone, then the contract stage looks like the last practical point where a buyer can correct a cost estimate, an accountability gap or a readiness problem.

It helps to know the sample before reading the figures. Method Research prepared the online survey, and RepData distributed it to 250 full-time decision-makers in the United States and Canada who oversee and influence warehouse automation. Responses came in between August 17 and 31, 2026.

Where the cost surprises land

Lifetime cost is the first of those three decisions. The survey's cost findings point to the gap between the quote and the years that follow it.

The 43% figure deserves a closer look because its denominator is narrower than the others. It counts only respondents whose systems fell short, and for that group the overrun ran anywhere from about a quarter more than expected to double the expected total.

The maintenance finding may matter more over time. A one-time overrun hurts once. Undisclosed costs that raise annual maintenance spend come back every year the system runs, and the 94% switching figure suggests most buyers will be paying them for the full 10 to 15 years. That combination points to lifetime-cost modeling, more than the purchase price, as the place where a buyer's estimate has the most room to go wrong.

Scale didn't protect anyone. At companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, 21% said their most significant automation investment underperformed, against 13% at smaller companies. The report doesn't give a cause, so the safe reading is a narrow one: a bigger budget and a bigger team didn't buy a better outcome on their own.

One system, several builders

For sixty percent of respondents, more than one company had a hand in designing their system. One in seven say they haven't seen automation's benefits because no vendor takes full responsibility for performance.

Romain Moulin, Exotec's CEO and co-founder, said in the company's announcement that regret seldom comes from the technology itself. As he sees it, problems start when a system built from several vendors stops working as one unit, and the customer is left to figure out who is responsible for the fix. According to Moulin, the operations that see the best results from automation are those in which one partner is accountable for how the entire system performs, starting at design and continuing through every year it stays in service.

Buyers who worked directly with the equipment manufacturer rated root-cause identification speed higher than other buyers, 75% against 69%, a gap of six points. That is a real difference but a modest one, and it looks smaller still next to the price-based split in the next section.

Low price, prepared teams and readiness

Buyers who chose low-cost providers report regret most often. Their odds of saying they backed the wrong vendor were close to five times higher: 24%, compared with 5% of other buyers. Only 52% of them rated root-cause identification as fast. Among everyone else, that figure was 74%.

That 22-point gap in repair speed is far wider than the six-point manufacturer gap, which suggests price tier tracked how quickly problems got diagnosed more closely than the contracting route did in this sample. In the full sample, 59% think low-cost providers hide costs and common complications upfront. That perception connects back to the cost section: the undisclosed costs that 70% say raised their maintenance spend are exactly what respondents expect the cheapest bids to leave out.

Early adopters with dedicated automation teams and leadership oversight almost never regretted their vendor: 1% said they chose wrong, compared with 11% of fast followers. Across all respondents, 27% say their operation wasn't ready when they invested.

The segments overlap, so the chart isn't a ranking of four separate groups. Taken together, though, the numbers suggest that what a buyer brings to the project, meaning a team that owns automation and executives who watch it, could matter alongside which vendor gets the contract.

Peak season and the humanoid question

Ninety-one percent of respondents describe automation as a basic requirement. Among those who have already automated, 86% say they enter peak season with more confidence than before. AI shows the same gap between adoption and maturity: 99% of organizations use it in some form, but 24% are still in the pilot stage.

Read next to the 94% switching figure, the 91% suggests buyers have little room on either side. Going without automation isn't seen as an option, and changing provider afterward is seen as too expensive.

Seventy-seven percent trust purpose-built fulfillment automation to deliver better ROI than humanoids over the next five years, yet 48% say they're optimistic about implementing humanoids. Those answers could coexist: a buyer may be curious about one technology and still put the money on another.

The time frames don't match, either. The ROI question covers five years, while the systems respondents say they can't afford to leave stay in service for 10 to 15. So whichever technology wins the budget, the buyer is committing for two to three times as long as the period the ROI comparison covers.