24th January 2026
Date
Interviewee
Mark Delaney
A Forklift, a Scanner, and a Lesson in Technological Disconnect
Mark Delaney stood in a customer's distribution center about a year ago, watching a forklift operator perform what should have been a routine task. The driver raised his forks three stories high, grabbed a pallet from roughly 30 feet in the air, brought the entire thing down to the floor, climbed out of his cab, scanned a barcode with a handheld device, climbed back in, and lifted the pallet all the way back up again.
The whole process took five or six minutes. Delaney couldn't help himself.
"I walked over and I introduced myself and I said, just please help me understand what that was," Delaney recalls. The operator's response was simple: "My scanner doesn't reach 30 feet in the air."
Delaney's reaction was immediate recognition. "Oh my God, we fixed that technology like 10 years ago."
The moment crystallized something Delaney has observed throughout his decades in retail technology and supply chain innovation: the gap between what's possible and what's actually deployed in the field remains staggeringly wide. It's a lesson that extends far beyond warehouses, reaching into healthcare, legal services, and any industry grappling with the promise and pressure of technological transformation.
Mark Delaney's Journey: From Nielsen to Infosys
Delaney's path to becoming a leader in mobility solutions at Infosys began in an unlikely place: retail shelves. Working for AC Nielsen (as it was known then), he managed teams who stocked shelves and checked inventory using what he describes as "very ancient technology," little handheld mobile computers that felt inadequate for the problems they were trying to solve.
"We're trying to solve some pretty important problems in terms of having product on the shelf for customers when they come into a store," he explains. "And we're doing it with very antiquated technology."
That frustration planted a seed. Several career stops later, Delaney landed at Zebra Technologies, the company that essentially invented the barcode. Surrounded by engineers developing both hardware and software to make work more efficient and less physically punishing, something clicked.
"That's when I sort of fell in love with the whole mobility space," he says.
The Cobot Revolution: When Robots Become Colleagues
Today, when conversations turn to AI and robotics, Delaney hears a familiar refrain: technology is coming for jobs. He pushes back against this narrative with the fervor of someone who has seen the reality on warehouse floors.
"I think it's being grossly overblown," he says. "A lot of the jobs that robotics are taking are jobs that most people don't want to do anyway because they're very difficult, they're very hard, they're back breaking."
He points to a recent visit to a distribution center for a mattress retailer. Anyone who has tried to flip their own mattress knows the struggle. Now imagine doing that for eight or ten hours a day.
What Delaney has witnessed instead of job replacement is something more nuanced: the rise of cobots, collaborative robots that work alongside human employees rather than replacing them.
"You're someone who's told, okay, you're going to go pick the next 50 items for an order," he explains. "In the past, you might have had a cart or a pallet that you have to push around on your own. Now instead, you've got this robot following you around that as soon as you pick something off the shelf, you just put it in the cart to the robot. And the robot holds on to the heavy weight."
The initial reaction from workers is predictable: fear. "The first time they heard about this technology being deployed, they were like, oh, they're coming for my job." But the reality has been different. "Now they're like, you know what? This is awesome. I come home to my kids and my back isn't killing me. I'm not exhausted."
The First Inning Problem: Why Most Industries Lag Behind
Here's where Delaney delivers his most sobering assessment. Despite the headlines about Amazon's automated warehouses and AI-powered everything, the vast majority of operations remain decidedly low-tech.
"There are a few market leaders that are doing a lot of stuff around robotics or very deeply already into AI," he acknowledges. "The vast majority are still in the first inning, and I would say not even the top of the first inning. It's just that nascent of a market right now."
The fact of the matter, he says, is that most warehouses and distribution centers are still running on pen and paper. For these operations, moving to mobile computers and technologies like RFID represents a significant leap. Jumping straight to robotics would be too much, too fast.
This reality check applies across industries. Delaney shares a story about a friend who practices law.
"I joked with a buddy of mine who's an attorney because I had this fax machine I've been trying to throw out, and he's like, oh, I still fax all the time." The disbelief in Delaney's voice is palpable. "You fax? Like, you literally fax? He's like, oh yeah, all the time. This is just very common in the legal profession."
In Delaney's world, that fax machine serves one purpose: holding open the basement door.
Mark Delaney's Framework for Evaluating Emerging Technology
With the National Retail Federation's massive trade show approaching in January, Delaney makes a prediction: virtually every booth will have "AI" plastered on its exterior.
"I will wager a bet that every single booth, or 99% of them, will have AI on the outside of the booth to try to attract attention," he says. "Now, when you walk inside the booth and you talk to someone within the booth, if you really ask them, what are the use cases around AI, a lot of them are going to scratch their heads because they just don't know."
He references a joke that circulated on LinkedIn recently: executives screaming "We need AI! We need AI!" while IT professionals shout back, "For what?" The executives' response: "We don't know, but we need it!"
This captures the current moment perfectly. The pressure to adopt AI and automation is immense, but the understanding of how to apply it meaningfully lags far behind.
Delaney's antidote is straightforward but demanding: understand the workflow first.
"Sit down and figure out, okay, here's my current workflow today as it exists. If I were to introduce AI, if I were to introduce robotics or some form of automation, what would the net effect be on that workflow? Because if you don't understand that and appreciate that and evaluate it up front, whatever automation, AI, whatever technology you throw at it is going to fail."
The failure, he emphasizes, comes from ignoring the people doing the actual work. "For the foreseeable future, these DCs and these warehouses and these retail stores are still full of people."
The Day-in-the-Life Method: Mark Delaney's Approach to Process Improvement
When Delaney is tasked with modernizing operations for major retailers, his starting point surprises some people. He doesn't begin with technology assessments or vendor evaluations. He walks the floor.
"My preferred method is to just get into a DC and understand," he explains. "Spend a day, spend half a day, whatever the appropriate amount of time is, go in there, preferably with an engineer or someone who really understands the technical part of it, and just walk around."
The key is talking to the workers themselves. "Take an associate off the floor and literally have them spend half an hour, whatever makes sense, explaining their day from the time they clock in to the time they clock out. Just doing that is going to uncover areas of waste, of just ineficiency."
He also insists on bringing customer leadership along for these walk-throughs. Often, these are executives who worked in distribution centers years ago but haven't set foot in one for a decade or more.
"I've had some folks do that with me from the customer and it opens their eyes as well. They're like, oh God, I still think of this as I was doing it 10 or 15 years ago. I didn't realize things were this bad."
Cross-Industry Applications: From Warehouses to Hospitals to Law Firms
The principles Delaney applies in retail and supply chain translate directly to other industries wrestling with paper-heavy, labor-intensive processes.
In healthcare, hospitals are equipping nurses, doctors, and orderlies with mobile computers. The goal is efficiency and visibility. "Where are the wheelchairs? Where is the X-ray machine? Where are the blood pumps?" These questions, which once required physical searches through hospital corridors, can now be answered instantly with the right technology.
"Just like a customer who has a DC who wants to understand where their pallet of XYZ product is and can use technology to solve that, the same technology can be replicated on the healthcare side," Delaney explains.
For legal professionals, the applications are equally apparent. "If you think about attorneys or the medical profession, those are folks who deal with a lot of paper. Medical records, legal records. They have to be housed somewhere. They have to be brought out from time to time to review cases, to review patient files."
The vision isn't far-fetched: instead of lawyers or paralegals venturing into dark filing rooms to hunt for decade-old case files, automation could retrieve documents on command. "Just push a button and then let a bot go and find it and drag it to the front of the pile instead of you going into a big dark room and trying to figure out where it is, dragging it off the shelf, dusting it off."
The Share Group Strategy: Learning from Competitors
For leaders trying to modernize resistant organizations, Delaney offers counterintuitive advice: talk to your competitors.
He describes watching executives from Walmart and Target, "arch enemies in the marketplace," sitting together over coffee, discussing emerging technologies.
"They're not doing that to give up any trade secrets to their arch enemy. They're just trying to learn. Hey, have you seen this organization? Have you seen this company? Have you seen this technology? What did you learn? What did you not learn?"
Every industry has these informal share groups, whether formal associations or simply networks of professionals who exchange insights. Delaney believes this kind of peer learning has intensified since the pandemic.
"I think one of the few positive things that came out of COVID was there seems to be this spirit of, hey, we're all in this together. And I think that translates to both the junior level in organizations, but also to the C-suite. I think people are a lot more open and willing to share best practices, to share ideas, to share learnings with each other."
The Golden Rule of Technology Implementation
Delaney saves his most critical piece of advice for last. Before any investment, before any deployment, have a conversation with the people who will actually use the technology.
"Don't just go out and make a big investment in technology, whatever that technology may be, don't just do it and put it into their hands and assume that they're going to be like, oh, thank you, thank you. This is great. Have the conversation with them ahead of time."
The reasoning is practical. If frontline workers reveal a fundamental flaw in your assumptions during these early conversations, you've saved yourself from a costly mistake. "Isn't that a much better time to find out than after you've invested in the technology?"
He's seen the alternative play out too many times: technology mandated from above, pushed onto reluctant users, only to sit gathering dust six months later.
"I've been in situations where organizations have said, you will use this. Six months later, whatever that technology is sitting, gathering dust."
Taking time to consult workers does more than surface potential problems. It builds buy-in. "Those folks will give you respect because that means that you're actually taking their views into account rather than just pushing something out and saying, you will use this."
Looking Forward: The Human Element in an Automated Future
As distribution centers and professional service firms alike navigate the pressure to automate, Delaney's message is clear: the technology matters far less than the process of implementation. The most sophisticated AI in the world will fail if it's deployed without understanding the humans it's meant to serve.
The forklift operator with the antiquated scanner wasn't resistant to technology. He was working with what he'd been given, solving problems the only way he could. Someone, somewhere, simply hadn't connected the available solutions to the people who needed them most.
In an era when every vendor promises transformation through AI, Mark Delaney suggests a different starting point. Walk the floor. Talk to the workers. Understand the workflow. Only then does the technology conversation begin to make sense.
"At the end of the day," he says, "we just want to make the experience better."
Mark Delaney leading industry expert in supply chain and automation. He is based on Long Island, New York.
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