automatica 2027
Munich.

What automatica is, in two lines

automatica is the world’s leading fair for smart automation and robotics: industrial and service robotics, assembly and handling technologies, machine vision, software and artificial intelligence for manufacturing. It’s the international meeting point where industry, research and policymakers discuss digitalization, AI, sustainable production and the future of work. It runs on a biennial cycle at Messe München, and the 2025 edition recorded 798 exhibitors from 40 countries, 49,284 visitors from 97 countries (38% international) and 66,000 m² of gross exhibition space across 6 halls. This isn’t a generalist fair: it’s where the global automation industry comes to see, concretely, who supplies what.

Precisely because of this, the thing many exhibitors underestimate is that the real purchase decisions don’t close at the stand: they mature in the weeks that follow, when the engineer or production manager gets back to the company, compares the suppliers they met, brings in the system integrator and opens the internal technical evaluation. On sales cycles as long as those in automation, whoever mishandles leads in the days and weeks after automatica loses, right there, exactly the pipeline they paid dearly to generate. Being at the fair is 30% of the work; the remaining 70% is what happens to the contacts afterwards.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

automatica covers the entire automation chain: robotics and automation (industrial and service robots, motion, end effectors, AGV/AMR), machine vision and assembly (machine vision, assembly and handling technologies, quality control), and the cross-cutting axis of Industry 4.0 and AI (production software, digital twins, connectivity, AI applied to manufacturing). The 2025 edition was spread across 6 halls of Messe München; the hall assignment for 2027 has not yet been published, so check the official map as soon as it’s out before signing for space.

The practical positioning advice: choose your area based on who you’re looking for, not just on what you are. A machine-vision or AI-software supplier reaches the right decision-makers if it sits along the robotics and assembly flows, where line managers with concrete problems to solve pass through. Study the flows between halls and the proximity to demo areas and conferences: at Messe München the distance between two halls is a real cost for the visitor, and your placement decides how many of the right profiles walk past you.

Visitor profile

The automatica visitor is technical, international and with decision-making power. In 2025, operators arrived from 97 countries, with a 38% international share and a strong axis toward German and DACH industry. The typical makeup of the audience:

• Production and manufacturing managers (around 25-30%), they arrive with concrete line problems and look for applicable automation solutions
• Automation and robotics engineers and designers (around 20-25%), they evaluate technologies to bring into the projects of the next 12-24 months
• System integrators and assembly-line managers (a significant share), often the decisive link between supplier and end customer
• R&D and machine-vision experts (growing), driven by AI, machine vision and quality
• Buyers in automotive, mechanical engineering, electronics and logistics, who compare suppliers, often with a shortlist already in hand
• Digitalization/Industry 4.0 and industrial-AI managers, the audience most focused on software and data

Average seniority is high and a significant portion of visitors hold a decision-making role or strong influence over purchasing. That’s why the risk isn’t a shortage of contacts, but the opposite: in four days at this density you talk with hundreds of people and, without a structured capture system, you remember only a fraction of them. With such a technical audience, the quality of the data collected at the stand matters more than the number of scans.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Make sure your value proposition answers the three questions every technical visitor asks within the first 30 seconds at the stand:

1. What you do, in one sentence
2. For whom, a precise ICP segment (e.g. “robotic loading/unloading cells for plastic molding”, not “automation solutions”)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (cycle time, scrap rate, OEE, cost per part, payback in months)

The automation audience, and the DACH audience in particular, rewards technical concreteness: data, process figures, real cases, not marketing. At automatica, where competitors are often in the same hall a few meters away, a generic promise makes you indistinguishable. One clear sentence, repeated identically by every member of the team.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

At a fair of this scale and duration, the risk is overload and dispersion. Define who does what:

• Who staffs the stand front line and welcomes the flow
• Who handles the cell/robot demos and the senior decision-makers who show up
• Who stays in the back office (HQ) to kick off follow-up on the hottest leads already during the event
• How the shifts rotate: at automatica the days are long and conversation quality drops after a few hours, so plan the rotation

Also decide in advance how appointments get set: some of the best traffic is organized before the fair, including through the official app’s exhibitor search.

Week -2 → 3-question qualification form

Every contact collected must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. With ~49,000 visitors over four days, “later” is an indistinct heap of business cards. The critical questions are just three:

1. Timing, when is the solution/cell needed? (Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4/don’t know)
2. Budget, is there already a spending line or an allocated investment project?
3. Decision, who decides and how many people are involved (including any system integrator)?

Everything else, company size, sector, exact role, technologies in use, can be found in the 30+ public data sources that good automatic enrichment covers without taking precious time away from the technical conversation.

Week -1 → CRM integration

The classic mistake: contacts on paper, photos of badges, scans in the app, and then nobody pours them into the CRM. In manufacturing, the average follow-up starts 9 days after the event, when the prospect has already talked to your competitors, who at automatica were in the same hall.

Set up the system so that every scan, at the fair, lands already in the company CRM, with event tag + qualification answers + the rep’s voice note. Not in an Excel, not only in the fair app, not in a sheet “we’ll sort out when we get back”. This is the step that decides whether the four days of automatica become pipeline or stay a pile of names.

Is the official automatica app worth it?

Yes, the automatica App (by Messe München) is worth installing: it’s for searching exhibitors, consulting the interactive hall maps and following the conference program with calendar and favorites section. It’s available for download about 6 weeks before the fair opens. For the visitor it’s an excellent orientation tool across 6 halls; for the exhibitor, the exhibitor search helps pre-build a few appointments.

That said, you need to understand what the app does NOT do, because that’s exactly the part that generates pipeline:

• It doesn’t export to your CRM. Contacts live in the fair’s ecosystem, not in HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive
• It doesn’t enrich the data. What you read is what’s there: no company size, revenue, technologies, verified role
• It doesn’t qualify. It doesn’t collect timing/budget/decision on the spot, they stay indistinct contacts
• It doesn’t send follow-up. You have to build the post-fair sequence yourselves, manually, after re-exporting the data
• It doesn’t generate executive reports. A list at most
• It changes with every edition. Login, features and data format aren’t a stable system of yours: it’s theirs, and automatica is biennial, so the “system” disappears for two years

The app is a good navigation and exhibitor-search tool. As a commercial lead-capture system fair → CRM → follow-up, it leaves uncovered everything that turns traffic into deals. That’s the gap Linkly fills: scan at the stand → contact directly in your CRM with event tag, qualification answers and the rep’s voice note → 6 AI agents that enrich the data from 30+ public sources, qualify and trigger personalized follow-up → executive report. See how Linkly works.

What to do during the 4 days of the fair

Day 1 (Tuesday 22 June), opening and calibration

• Team briefing before opening: review the 3 messages and the roles. The first day is for tuning the machine
• Quick calibration: the first 10-15 leads serve to fine-tune the qualification questions and the timing of the cell demo, then you hit your stride
• On Tuesday the flow is already substantial but more “exploratory”: many are scouting to come back on the central days. Capture everything anyway, even those who say “I’ll come back tomorrow”
• Short debrief at the end of the day: what’s working, what to fix, which hot leads to call back this very evening

Day 2 (Wednesday 23 June), peak day

• Often one of the highest-traffic and highest decision-density days: the profiles who only scouted on the first day arrive
• Concentrate the main demos and the pre-booked appointments here
• Keep one person in the back office on live follow-up: Tuesday’s hot leads need to be touched now, not after you return
• Maximum discipline on on-the-spot qualification: it’s the day when you collect the most contacts and risk dispersion the most

Day 3 (Thursday 24 June), consolidation

• Traffic still full, with conversations that are on average more in-depth: those who come back on the third day often already have a shortlist and are after technical details
• A good moment for substantive negotiations and for closing post-fair appointments with the decision-makers and the customer’s system integrator
• Take a targeted tour of the halls: see the competitors, spot integration partners (and the parallel events LASER World of PHOTONICS and World of Quantum, accessible with a single ticket) and understand how you’re positioning yourselves

Day 4 (Friday 25 June), closing, less traffic but higher quality

• On the last day the flow drops, but those who come are often very targeted: fewer browsers, more operators with a precise goal
• Dedicate it to closing the loose ends, gathering the last technical requests and confirming the next steps agreed in the previous days
• By the end of the day the entire lead base must already be in the CRM, qualified and tagged: follow-up starts tonight, not next Monday

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

The average time between fair and first post-event contact, in manufacturing, is 9 days. Companies that cut it to under 48 hours close, on average, far more than the slow competitors. At automatica this counts in an amplified way: your prospect met dozens of automation suppliers over four days, their memory window is short and your competitors were in the same hall. And since the fair is biennial, you won’t have a “next edition in a year” to catch up: the pipeline opened here has to be worked now.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, a personalized email to each qualified lead based on timing/budget/decision. No generic template: a concrete reference to something said at the stand (the application, the line, the process problem)
2. Within 7 days, a referent sales rep assigned to each qualified lead, with a specific scheduled touchpoint (call, demo, site visit). No batch email
3. Within 14 days, deliver on the promises made at the stand (datasheet, feasibility study, cell layout, quote). Automatically extractable from the rep’s voice notes if the system recorded them
4. Within 30 days, an executive report on performance vs target: breakdown by rep, sector, hall and estimated pipeline. It’s the document with which you justify to the CFO the budget to return in 2029

This is the point where Linkly’s 6 AI agents work in your place: the contacts arrive in the CRM already enriched and qualified, the follow-up sequences start on their own with the right angle, and the executive report generates itself without rebuilding anything by hand from an export.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at automatica 2027?

Official costs must be requested from Messe München and depend on floor space, hall, stand type (space only vs turnkey) and visibility. As a purely indicative figure for a world-class fair of this scale in Munich, the space item typically starts from several hundred euros per square meter, and a complete outing (space + build + staff + travel + logistics) for a medium stand easily lands in the order of tens of thousands of euros, even more if you bring a working robotic cell. These are indicative estimates, not quotes: ask the organizer for the updated price list and reason in terms of cost per qualified lead, not the cost of the space.

Which is the best day to staff the stand?

The central days (Wednesday and Thursday) generally concentrate the highest traffic and the greatest decision density. The opening Tuesday is more exploratory, Friday drops in volume but brings very targeted visitors. In practice: every day counts, but plan the main demos and key appointments on the two central days.

When should visitors register?

Online and in advance, from the official site. Early registration is the standard route, it gives you the digital ticket (manageable from the app) and avoids queues at the entrances; also remember that a single ticket gives access to LASER World of PHOTONICS and World of Quantum as well, running on the same days. For exhibitors, space must be requested from Messe München well in advance: being a biennial fair, the best halls sell out very early.

Is the official app enough to manage leads?

No. The app is excellent for navigation, exhibitor search and hall maps, but it doesn’t export to your CRM, doesn’t enrich, doesn’t qualify and doesn’t send follow-up (see the dedicated section above). To turn scans into pipeline you need a fair → CRM → follow-up system like Linkly.

What’s the alternative to collecting leads on paper or photos of badges?

Paper and photos of badges are the surest way to lose contacts: nobody pours them into the CRM in time and on-the-spot qualification disappears. The alternative is to capture at the stand with a scan that lands directly in the CRM, with event tag, qualification answers and a voice note, plus automatic data enrichment. This way follow-up starts within 24h instead of after 9 days, a decisive advantage at a biennial fair where the window to close doesn’t reopen in twelve months.

Page updated ahead of the 2027 edition. For official information and exhibitor/visitor registration, refer to the site automatica-munich.com.