A conference session gives you an hour with a topic and forty strangers. A summit gives you half a day with the same community in the room the whole time, which is a different thing entirely — you get the case studies and the hallway argument that follows them.
Automation Fair 2026 runs five summits across the four days in Boston, and all five are included with both the General Access Pass and the General Access + Advanced Training Pass at no additional cost. That makes them the highest-value block on the schedule if the topic lines up with your work. Here's what each one covers, and where they collide.
Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) Summit — Monday, November 16
The process automation community's own gathering: technical sessions and case studies on emerging technologies and control strategies, including a PlantPAx DCS roadmap discussion.
If you run PlantPAx, the roadmap discussion is reason enough to fly in Sunday night. Roadmap content is the one thing you genuinely cannot get from a spec sheet, and it's the input that changes how you phase a modernization.
8:00am–4:30pm — the longest of the five, and effectively your entire Monday.
Secure Digital Operations Summit — Tuesday, November 17
Aimed at operations, digital, IT and cybersecurity leaders, this one covers building resilient, secure, data-driven operations spanning IT/OT infrastructure, industrial data, AI, MES and cybersecurity. Format is keynotes plus breakout sessions.
That's a wide brief, and deliberately so — the premise is that OT security, industrial data architecture and MES are the same conversation rather than three. If you're the person who has to get IT and controls to agree on something, this is your room.
10:00am–2:00pm
OEM Leader-to-Leader Summit — Tuesday, November 17
Rockwell Automation executives and OEM leaders together on machine lifecycle challenges and how the latest technology maximizes machine value. It's pitched at leaders and executives, not at the bench.
For a machine builder, the useful content here tends to be commercial rather than technical — what customers are willing to pay for connected machines, how service revenue changes when you can deploy remotely, where the lifecycle argument lands.
11:30am–3:30pm
Production Logistics Summit — Wednesday, November 18
Autonomous material movement — AMRs, robotics and digital engineering — covered through success stories and peer discussion, aimed at manufacturing practitioners and automation experts rather than executives alone.
This is the summit with the clearest practitioner bent. If material movement is the constraint in your plant, and particularly if you're weighing AMRs against fixed conveyor or independent cart transport, the peer-discussion format is where the real numbers come out.
11:30am–3:30pm
Smart Safety Summit — Thursday, November 19
The argument that safety is a strategic advantage rather than a compliance tax, worked through smart machines, robotics, AI and connected operations. Expert discussions and case studies covering modern safety architectures and workforce readiness.
Modern safety architecture is where a lot of plants are quietly behind — integrated safety in the controller versus a separate relay-based system is a decision that reaches into machine design, downtime and staffing. Half a day on it is not excessive.
9:00am–2:00pm
Where the summits collide
Four scheduling facts worth knowing before you commit:
- Tuesday forces a choice. Secure Digital Operations (10:00am–2:00pm) and OEM Leader-to-Leader (11:30am–3:30pm) overlap by two and a half hours. You attend one.
- PSUG costs you all of Monday. At 8:00am–4:30pm it rules out Monday's off-site tours and the 1:00–2:15pm keynote. Since Monday has no Expo, that's a cleaner trade than it looks — but it is a trade.
- Both Tuesday summits start after the keynote. The Tuesday keynote runs 8:30–9:45am, so you keep it either way. What you lose is the Expo morning — the floor opens at 9:45am and Secure Digital Operations starts at 10:00am.
- Wednesday is the cleanest day to summit. Keynote at 8:30am, Expo from 9:45am, Production Logistics 11:30am–3:30pm, then back on the floor until 5:00pm. Nothing is sacrificed.
Thursday's Smart Safety Summit runs 9:00am–2:00pm against an Expo window of 8:30am–4:00pm, which still leaves you two hours on the floor — and they're the last two hours of the show, when exhibitors have time to talk.
How to choose
The summits reward specificity. A summit is worth half your day when the topic is a decision you're actually facing this year — a PlantPAx modernization, an AMR business case, an OT security program that needs to survive contact with IT. It's worth much less as general education, because the sessions cover that ground in one-hour blocks you can slot around everything else.
So pick by the project on your desk, not by the topic that sounds most interesting. Then build the rest of the week around the half-day hole it leaves.
If you want to talk through which summit maps to the systems you're running — or what a PlantPAx or safety architecture modernization would look like on your plant floor — the HESCO team is here for that conversation. Get in touch.
