Terence Leung, senior director of solutions with Blue Yonder, offers a vision of the future for logistics.

Buying land is a major shift for Amazon, which historically relied on a handful of developers to find property, build fairly simple warehouses and rent them back to the company. Now, Amazon is increasingly taking parts of the development process in-house — often bidding against long-time partners for the best space.

The definition of a warehouse is evolving rapidly, and automation must keep pace with the change, says Jayesh Mehta, industry group manager with MHI.

The number-one labor challenge for supply chains today is worker availability at the retail level, says Pete Blair, vice president of marketing with Berkshire Grey.

Ever evolving, robotics now can meet most any job in any situation, says Mike Futch, chief executive officer of Tompkins Robotics.

Vision, mobility and enhanced safety features make robotics ideal for labor automation, says Divya Prakash, director of business consulting at SICK.

Artificial intelligence brings resilience and enhanced performance metrics to warehouse data capture, says Marin Tchakarov, chief executive officer of Kindred.