With more than one million robots at its warehouses, Amazon’s global workforce of 1.56 million people is on the verge of being outnumbered by the machines, The Wall Street Journal reports. The e-commerce giant, a bellwether for companies automating work, is planning to ramp up its use of robots further once they are equipped with artificial intelligence, which will enable them to respond to verbal commands.
In conjunction with this, Amazon is also equipping its warehouses with AI and connecting the robots with order-fulfillment processes, according to Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy. The aim, Jassy said, is “to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and robot efficiency.”
Although Amazon is deploying more robots, maintains Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist Tye Brady, Amazon will continue to need workers. The robots are merely meant to help Amazon manage heavy staff turnover, reduce menial tasks, and make workers’ jobs easier — not to replace people, Brady said.
However, Jassy himself, in a June 17 company memo to employees as reported by CNBC, said the robots and generative AI “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” The robots have created a new “management” position at Amazon for 700,000 workers: overseeing the robots.
Jassy seemed to reference this new job in his memo, saying that while Amazon “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” Amazon will need “more people doing other types of jobs.” Neisha Cruz, one of the Amazon workers who holds a robot manager position at an Amazon warehouse in Windsor, Conn., said the job pays 2.5 times what she was earning when she joined Amazon.
Amazon’s real goal is to drastically reduce its workforce, maintains Sheheryar Kaoosji, executive director at Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of warehouse workers.
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