[EXHIBITOR EDITION] The Human Advantage: Why Trade Shows Still Matter

Guest: Matt Reynolds, Chief Editor, Packaging World and Rebecca Marquez, Director, Custom Research, PMMI

In this special Exhibitor Edition episode, we explore why trade shows still matter in an AI-driven world, and how businesses are balancing automation, workforce challenges, sustainability pressures, and ROI in a rapidly changing market.

Sean Riley: Hi, and welcome back to unPACKed with PMMI. I’m your host, Sean Riley.

In this special Exhibitor Edition of unPACKed, we sit down with Chief Editor of Packaging World, Matt Reynolds, and Director of Custom Research at PMMI, Rebecca Marquez, to explore why trade shows still matter in an AI-driven world — and how businesses are balancing automation, workforce challenges, sustainability pressures, and ROI in a rapidly changing market.

With all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Matt Reynolds and Rebecca Marquez.

Rebecca Marquez: Hi, thanks for having us.

Matt Reynolds: Thanks for having us.

Sean Riley: Oh, the pleasure is all ours. Matt, our annual Outlook report frames 2026 as this year of, we'll call it, disciplined progression. What does that mean in practical terms for exhibitors at our shows?

Matt Reynolds: I think, in practical terms, everything is going to be very attached to ROI. Nobody's looking for moonshots or trying to totally reinvent the wheel. It's more of a honing, continuous improvement type of attitude. Topics like whether it's digitalization, AI, or sustainability, they're being overwhelmed on all fronts by sometimes competing requirements: EPR, make it lighter, use less material. Meanwhile, we've got the Walmarts of the world asking for more robust and more consistent packaging, so it's like all these competing tensions.

I think, yeah, deliberate is the right word. The attendees, the CPGs, the brand owners, and the co-packers who are going to be walking the show have a needle to thread, and they've got a fixed budget, so they're looking to attach things closely to ROI, to make sure that they're able to draw a very clean line to what they're purchasing and to what the benefits are going to be. Not immediate benefits, sometimes longer-term benefits, because these pieces of equipment need to last for years and years to come.

Sean Riley: Now, Rebecca, would that be something that you guys are seeing from custom research, the research that you guys are doing? Would that be in line with that? Are you seeing something different? What are you guys seeing on your end?

Rebecca Marquez: No, we actually are seeing really similar things in our own data. I would say that for both custom research, which is proprietary for either our members or anyone we're working with, or business intelligence. Matt brought up something interesting. He brought up Walmart, which I want to touch on because retail is really a big driver. We're seeing that there are a lot of changes that are happening because of retail requirements. Not that that's the only thing. Sustainability is also a driver as well, but we're really noticing that retail is up and coming as a driver for changes, for innovation, a driver behind sustainability itself. We're noticing that in a lot of the data that we're capturing.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. Walmart, when they move, the market moves. It's not just Walmart, it's Costco, you name it. That leans further into the e-commerce side of things. It's a unique channel compared to on-the-shelf. But all of these retailers have these huge automated distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and they're automated and getting more automated. It's something that maybe packaging for the last 20 years hadn't had to account for. Some of the forces that are going on in these back rooms or distribution DCFCs, now they're being asked to account for as another thing, as just another variable. It's not now you can ignore sustainability or now you can ignore all these other directives that are being given to you from every which angle, but here's just yet another one. Whatever calculus they have to come up with to create the optimized package for the optimized channel just becomes that much more complex.

Sean Riley: With all this information out there, before the buyer is even talking to an exhibitor or a buyer is talking to a supplier, how are they getting their information? How are they doing their homework? Where are they finding the information that's leading up to their purchasing decisions?

Matt Reynolds: We hope Packaging World Magazine, but that is one of many channels that are available. Google has become a household word, but even that is changing in the AI era of generative AI. We're having to change the SEO on our articles and everything to make sure that the various AI systems, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, are picking up our content because we have our ear to the ground. But I think increasingly, AI research, Google, and internet research, hopefully they're using some of the tools that are available, whether that's ProSource or the tools that PMMI has available, and PMMI members. There's no one way people are coming into the market.

Rebecca Marquez: I do think that this varies along age demographics. Younger people are using newer tools. They're using the Googles, the AIs, and all of that. I also think that word of mouth is probably not losing importance. Word of mouth is still very much a thing. As a matter of fact, whenever we conduct research and look for key drivers of decision-making, we also always ask for key drivers of recommendations. I don't think that's going anywhere, regardless of the age demographic. I think that's staying just as important, but I still think trade shows play a vital role in this as well. People are going; they want to see machines in action. They want to network with their peers. They want to talk to people face-to-face. This is not, in any way, going away, trade shows.

I just want to say that maybe younger groups, and not always younger, just different groups, are relying on digital means, OEM magazine or Packaging World, or they're using digital versions of those to do some investigation on what they want to buy next.

Matt Reynolds: It's almost like an outgrowth of this highly digital AI world that's highly synthetic, that there's a reaction that kicks back into what I guess younger people would call authenticity. It's almost like coming back home to a real conversation with a real person instead of a chatbot, and the trust that's inherent between a person or a peer, or a friend, or somebody that you've worked with, compared to the very digitized generative AI. I think it's almost a reaction to, or in an era where everything is digital and everything is synthetic, the human element becomes that much more important.

Sean Riley: Okay. Then let's circle back a bit to the annual outlook report. What's something, Matt, that you can showcase as something that an exhibitor can take from the report to their next show or their next customer interaction to show this is something that's happening that can help you with your transactions?

Matt Reynolds: The equipment, even in the write-in answers on some of our questionnaires, the word flexibility is everywhere. Again, it's tied to that ROI. I guess the speed or the pace of change is so fast that there can be some sort of paralysis in making a decision and pulling the trigger on something for fear of it being obsolete tomorrow. Ensuring that everything has very specific ROIs, not just in the near term, but for the long term. It's not just the format or the shape or the structure, it's the material as well. Are they going to be able to handle the materials of the future, whether that's 100% recycled material that doesn't behave in quite as optimized a manner as the highly specialized multi-layer materials of the past?

It's being able to handle a lot of different formats, a lot of different materials we haven't even heard of yet, or are still somewhere in the back rooms of Dow in a testing room floor, and being able to be future-ready more than anything. That's why we summed up the annual outlook report as a mood of being very deliberate, very careful, very tied to ROI, because with the speed of change, the pace of change, nobody wants to make a move that renders them obsolete the next day.

Sean Riley: Okay. Then, Rebecca, how about beyond our annual outlook report? How's PMMI helping companies better understand their buyers? What kind of things are you seeing, whether it's in the custom research vein or business intelligence, that are helping companies hold the hands of their buyers?

Rebecca Marquez: One of the things that's really important, and Matt touched on it, is being future-ready. We just had a conference about this, and this topic came up. It's impossible to future-proof, but being future-ready is becoming increasingly important. I think one of the ways that BI is helping and that PMMI is helping, definitely, is in advocating for relationship building and collaboration. Because being future-ready is so important, we see that things like vehicles, like the show, become increasingly important in building relationships.

For a while, it seemed the nature of our business was getting more transactional, and it's actually not. It's still staying really relationship-based for reasons like being future-ready and having those relationships. When you buy a piece of machinery from an OEM or when an OEM sells something to a customer, that resilience is almost built in because it's relationship-driven.

That's exactly how I think PMMI is helping with our BI products and with the show because the show enables that face-to-face interaction, which is really important and is staying important. Then, with PMMI, we have our meetings where we bring together our members and their customers to discuss real-life problems. We do this at the show with our Vision 2030 sessions, and we do this in meetings throughout the year, too. We're really trying to push that collaboration among OEMs and their customers.

Sean Riley: Love that. This has been great. We've covered a ton of stuff in the short time that we were talking, but one thing that we haven't touched on yet, which I have to think is going to be an issue in anything that has to do with our industry, is the workforce. There's not enough labor. There's not enough skilled labor. It's impacting how end users and customers are doing their business. It's impacting how the machinery's being built. What are you guys hearing out there, and what can we do to help the exhibitors and help the buyers when it comes to things with the workforce?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. This was actually a whole chapter of our annual outlook report on workforce and labor, and the shift that's happening right now. We're at that threshold moment. Imagine a car of the 1980s and '90s, very highly mechanical, belt-driven, that a good mechanic, a mechanic who's been working on those Chevrolets and those Fords for 50 years, has all this tribal knowledge on how to fix. There are fewer of those types of mechanics as the cars have become Teslas or gas-free E-vehicles, and so on, and everything that was mechanical is becoming computerized.

I think a similar shift is happening that doesn't necessarily require that journeyman/artisan type of mechanic any longer. It requires an operator with a different skillset. It's a bumpy road as we're making that very slow turn, turning the Titanic. As you walk the show, you're going to see a lot of servo motors, you're going to see a lot of linear servo transport shuttles, and all these things that weren't part of the highly mechanical age of the past.

The results of the AOR say that skilled labor is really hard to find. Fifty-five to sixty percent say it's very difficult. I think the scale was anything from not difficult to very difficult, and most said very difficult. The more skilled the labor is, the harder it is to find.

Rebecca Marquez: And retain.

Matt Reynolds: And retain, yes. That's another thing, the merry-go-round of folks who spend six months to a year at one position, and because of the dearth of labor, can easily be wooed away to someplace down the street to make a little bit more, to have a little better hours. Retention is huge, too. That's how the tribal knowledge is gained. That's how the systems are learned and so on.

But brand owners are looking to automate their way out of this, in some sense. There's a strange dichotomy in that the brand owners and CPGs are asking for simpler equipment that's more accessible to, let's say, those who don't have an MIT grad degree to be able to operate. But simpler equipment for the OEM, for the manufacturer, is a lot harder to make because they're making something intuitive. Everything that happens underneath the hood, all the flexibility and all the adjustability, like I said, the flexibility to move from SKU to SKU, from material to material, all that is really hard to build and really expensive, but the output that a lot of the brand owners are asking for at the interaction at the HMI is going to be something that's a lot more intuitive. Maybe AI is part of a copilot in the HMI so that the operators aren't writing ladder logic. They're using human language to ask the machine to do something. It's this odd dichotomy between the apparently simpler equipment for the user, actually being a much more difficult task for the machine builder.

Rebecca Marquez: Yeah. Not everyone can invent an iPhone that's super intuitive. We're finding the same thing. Actually, workforce is something we talk about all the time at every single meeting, in almost every single paper that we put out. It is really challenging to find a skilled workforce, and it is really hard to keep them. There is starting to be a loss of tribal knowledge with people retiring and leaving their positions.

What we find is yes, brands are looking to automate their way out of this, but they're also looking to balance that automation and the people that they have. They're looking for things like built-in training. Matt, you mentioned they're looking for things that will take human language to diagnose certain problems, things that are easy for the operator to use and find out what's going on.

I know that there are some concerns about automating people out of the workforce, and everything that I've heard so far, that's not completely it. Brands want to leverage the people that they have using new developments and automation, and possibly letting them upskill too so they can do more important things. They do want to automate simpler tasks, repetitive tasks, and let people take on more decision-making roles, things that they have to think about more, rather than putting a peg in a hole or a box on a pallet or something like that.

Matt Reynolds: I think that works to cease that revolving door too, that kind of upward mobility, upskilling, and the investment in them that is likely to add greatly to retention.

Rebecca Marquez: Absolutely.

Sean Riley: Yeah. I would say that's a good button to put on our discussion. Thank you both for taking time out of your day to come on here with us. Matt, I want to thank you.

Matt Reynolds: You're welcome.

Sean Riley: And Rebecca, I want to thank you.

Rebecca Marquez: You're welcome.

Sean Riley: Thanks for listening, everybody.

Matt Reynolds: See everybody in Chicago at PACK EXPO.

Rebecca Marquez: See you there.