Santa Clara, California, will host the first Robotics Summit & Expo West in October 2027. The event replaces RoboBusiness, which ran for 20 years as a robotics industry show. Arrowfly, the B2B media and marketing company that runs it, says Robotics Summit & Expo West is dedicated to the design, deployment and scaling of commercial robots and the businesses built around them.
The announcement does not give a venue or specific dates within October 2027. It also does not say how large the event will be or who will speak.
Why the event is changing
Arrowfly ties the rebrand to a shift in the industry. Many robotics companies have moved past the prototype stage and are shipping products into factories, warehouses and other sites. The company says the questions facing those firms are no longer only technical. They now include design for manufacturing, bringing products to market, implementation, managing growing fleets, and providing service and support.
Steve Crowe, chair of the Robotics Summit, said the hardest problems have grown along with the industry. He said the new event will share lessons from industry leaders on moving from a pilot that works to a product deployed across multiple sites, and on building a business that can support it.
What the program covers
Arrowfly has organised Robotics Summit & Expo West around four themes that it describes as defining the post-prototype stage of a robotics company.
The first is deployment at scale. This covers what changes when a robot leaves a controlled pilot for multiple live sites, including integration, fleet management, remote monitoring and autonomous operation in increasingly unstructured environments.
The second is go-to-market and commercial strategy. It looks at how robotics companies respond to market demand and how they structure pricing, sales and channel strategies for products that combine hardware, software and services.
The third is field data and product decisions. This theme examines how real-world performance data feeds back into product iteration and the evolution of AI models. Arrowfly adds that ongoing service and support, whether delivered directly or through partners, is also key to demonstrating a return on investment.
The fourth is investment and growth. It addresses how investors evaluate robotics companies and how founding teams can build businesses that last.
The format includes keynotes with industry and thought leaders, sessions on technical and business topics, panel discussions and a curated expo floor. Arrowfly says attendees will hear from founders, operators and investors.
Two events, two audiences
The rebrand also sorts Arrowfly's robotics events into two distinct roles. Robotics Summit & Expo Boston will take place June 2-3, 2027, at the John B. Hynes Convention Center. Arrowfly calls it the flagship East Coast show, and it focuses on the core technical and engineering challenges of building robotic systems. The West event focuses on scaling the product and the company behind it. Arrowfly says the two together cover the full lifecycle of designing, building and bringing a robotics product to market.
Amanda Buehner, senior vice president of sales and strategy, engineering, at Arrowfly, framed the split as a difference in who is asking questions. "Deployment does not end the development process. It changes who is asking the questions," she said. She described the engineer designing a new mobile robot and the operations leader managing robots across a warehouse network as both essential, and said they need different conversations.
Arrowfly is also seeking sponsors and exhibitors. Robotics hardware, software and solution providers that want to reach engineers, product leaders and executives scaling robotics can contact the company's robotics team about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities.
What the rebrand signals, and what it does not
The change is mostly a positioning decision, and the stated reasoning holds together. A show built around technical development serves a different buyer than one built around running fleets, pricing hardware-plus-software products and funding growth. A product leader or operations executive has little reason to travel to a conference whose sessions are aimed at design engineers. By assigning engineering to Boston and commercialisation to the West Coast, Arrowfly is trying to give each audience a reason to attend its own event.
The location also fits the theme. Santa Clara is in the heart of Silicon Valley, close to many robotics startups and investors. The announcement does not make that argument itself, so it should be read as an inference. It is consistent with the program's emphasis on investment and company building.
The move also reflects a broader pattern. As a technology sector matures, its trade events tend to split between engineering gatherings and business gatherings. Arrowfly's framing, that deployment changes who asks the questions, describes that split directly. Whether it matches how robotics buyers and builders actually behave is a separate matter.
Several things remain unproven. The announcement gives no attendance targets, no exhibitor list, no speaker names beyond the quoted executives and no ticket prices. It does not say whether RoboBusiness's existing audience will carry over to the new name. Dropping a name with 20 years of recognition carries some risk, and the release offers no data on how the rebrand will be received.
The event is also being sold to sponsors before its program exists. The four themes are broad, and the strength of the sessions will determine whether operators and investors treat the show as useful or as a marketing venue. Questions such as fleet management, remote monitoring and field-data feedback are real problems for companies at scale. The first agenda, published ahead of October 2027, will show whether the conference addresses them with practitioners who have run deployments, or with general business content.