Amazon may soon be utilizing more robots than human in its warehouses as the number of deployed bots has nearly reached the e-commerce giant’s number of human warehouse employees.
The company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, which has been replacing humans or reducing their workloads with robots over the years, recently added more than one million robots to Amazon warehouses, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Today, robotics reportedly helps about 75 percent of Amazon’s global deliveries. While this has resulted in the reduction of menial, repetitive work for human employees, the robots have also been known to replace some workers.
The company’s average number of employees per warehouse last year was the lowest recorded in the past 16 years, while the number of packages that Amazon ships per employee has increased, the Journal reported.
Some of Amazon’s newer facilities, meanwhile, have “smaller employee footprints and help us deliver with greater speed,” a company spokesman told the newspaper.
Chief Executive Andy Jassy also revealed that Amazon is rolling out AI technology in its facilities “to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots.”
The e-commerce giant has said it will cut the size of its total workforce in the next several years, the Journal noted.
Notably, this type of technology has become increasingly advanced, as robots went from simply moving heavy items early on, to completing more complex tasks over time, such as packaging and sorting products.
Amazon products reportedly move 25 percent faster than they do at other facilities at the company’s warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, where robots sort, stack, and consolidate millions of items, zip carts of packages to be loaded onto trucks, help package customer paper bags, and transport products for packaging.
Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics, suggested this is not going to have a negative impact on employment, telling the Wall Street Journal, “You have completely new jobs being created,” such as robot technicians.
Dattatreya added that the company’s goal is to utilize robots as assistants for human workers.
Tye Brady, Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist, echoed those sentiments, insisting the robots are meant to make employee’s jobs easier, not replace them.
Warehouse Worker Resource Center executive director Sheheryar Kaoosji, however, warned the dynamics will not be advantageous for Amazon workers, long term, claiming the e-commerce giant’s “dream is to have significant reduction of workforce in high-density facilities.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
