What SLAS Told Me About How This Industry Explains Itself

Three days in Boston. Hundreds of boxy booths filled with boxy robots. And with all this technology, the handouts were print collateral or QR code-activated trading cards that drove you to digital versions of print collateral. SLAS is a genuinely good show. The science is serious, the problems are real. But something’s been nagging at me since I got back. This industry has a story problem. The floor was a sea of robots in boxes. Impressive robots. Expensive boxes.

“Buy Volvos – they’re boxy, but good” – Crazy People.

On display, I saw almost no indication of what any of it actually did for a real customer with a real problem. You had to start a conversation from scratch — sometimes with two or three different people at the same booth — just to figure out whether what they sold was relevant to you.

Problem 1: Almost every exhibitor that I spoke to said that they struggle to communicate their differentiated value consistently and effectively.

Except for a few booths, and mostly on day 1, there were plenty of experts and sales reps on hand to try to connect the dots between customer problems and their solutions. Each time a buyer engaged one of them, it required a lengthy conversation and the only visual support was the robot in a box running a squeaky pre-programmed demo loop. I bet that, depending on which booth staffer they spoke to, buyers got different answers about why they should buy from them. Imagine how fatiguing that must be to buyers who need to repeat this booth after booth.

Problem 2: Boxes don’t tell stories.

I counted two genuinely interactive experiences on the entire floor. Two. In a show built around automation and intelligent systems, the dominant communication strategy was still: find a rep, get a pitch, hope they ask the right questions. What was missing wasn’t enthusiasm or expertise. It was the bridge from “here’s what this is” to “here’s what this means for how you work.” Very few booths could tell you, without prompting, who their customer was or what problem they were hired to fix. They could tell you about throughput. They could tell you about compatibility. They could not tell you a story. Some companies have convinced themselves that complexity justifies this — that the sales cycle is long by nature, that the demo is the experience. Maybe. But the buyer who walked your booth on day two with a real project and a Q3 budget didn’t immediately understand where your product fit into their world, and moved on — she’s not coming back to read the follow-up email either. The companies I came away most interested in were the ones where I could figure out, fast, what they actually solved and for whom. Not from a brochure. From the booth itself. A few had it figured out. Most were still selling the box.