Warehouse robotics is now leased, not bought

The barrier to warehouse automation was never just the technology — it was the capital outlay and the risk of buying the wrong fleet. Robotics-as-a-service reframed it as a per-task or per-month operating cost, aligned to throughput.

That shift opened automation to operators who could never justify the upfront purchase.

Signal: when hardware moves to a service model, the addressable market expands to everyone who couldn't afford the capex.