Every industry has that one gathering everyone quietly calibrates their calendar around, the place where trends stop being abstract and suddenly look very real, very tangible, sometimes a little intimidating too. For the supply chain world, that gravitational center is MODEX, and 2026 looks set to underline why. When doors open in Atlanta this April, what unfolds isn’t just another exhibition but a dense snapshot of where logistics, manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation are actually headed, not in five years, but now, with all the friction and urgency that implies.
From April 13 to 16, the vast halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will fill with more than 50,000 supply chain professionals arriving from across the United States and well beyond it. The scale alone is part of the message. Three show floors stretching over roughly 630,000 square feet create an environment where the industry’s complexity becomes visible in physical form: robotics humming beside conveyor systems, AI-driven platforms competing for attention with sensors, autonomous vehicles, and sustainability-focused hardware. Walking the floor can feel a bit like paging through the future at full size, occasionally overwhelming, often energizing, and rarely boring.
What makes MODEX resonate year after year is that it isn’t content with spectacle. The exhibition floor is paired with a dense educational program that leans hard into the realities supply chain leaders are wrestling with: resilience under geopolitical pressure, labor constraints that refuse to disappear, cyber risks creeping deeper into operational technology, and sustainability mandates that are no longer optional slideware. More than 1,000 exhibitors will be on hand, but equally important are the conversations that unfold in keynotes and sessions, where theory meets the lived experience of global operations that break, recover, and adapt in real time.
The keynote lineup reflects that grounding. On April 13, Richard McPhail of The Home Depot brings lessons from the supply chain front line, a perspective forged in scale and stress rather than hype. The following day shifts the lens toward acceleration, with Salim Ismail exploring how exponential thinking and AI are reshaping logistics, drawing on his work with Singularity University and OpenExO. There’s even room for a different kind of story altogether on April 1, with a conversation featuring Dale Earnhardt Jr., a reminder that performance, risk, and decision-making under pressure aren’t confined to warehouses and ports.
Midweek, attention turns to the bigger picture with a panel previewing the 2026 MHI Annual Industry Report, moderated by John Paxton and Wanda Johnson of Deloitte. Voices from academia, consumer goods, entertainment manufacturing, and automotive logistics, including representatives from Disney and Carvana, underline how supply chain innovation now cuts across sectors that once barely spoke the same operational language. It’s less about silver bullets and more about rewiring systems to absorb shock and still move forward.
Underlying all of this is the quiet authority of MHI, whose leadership frames MODEX as a response to an era defined by disruption rather than stability. When John Paxton talks about embracing technology as a necessity, not a choice, it lands differently when you’re surrounded by machines already doing exactly that. Daniel McKinnon’s emphasis on connection and discovery feels less like marketing copy and more like a practical instruction manual for anyone trying to stay relevant in global commerce.
MODEX 2026 positions itself, unapologetically, as the largest manufacturing and supply chain event of the year, and it earns that claim through density rather than noise. For logistics leaders, tech strategists, and supply chain teams, it’s a place to stress-test assumptions, compare notes with peers who are facing the same constraints, and maybe leave with a partnership or two that didn’t exist before the show floor opened. Atlanta in April becomes a temporary capital of movement, data, steel, and software, and if your work depends on things getting from A to B under increasingly unforgiving conditions, it’s hard to argue this isn’t where you want to be.