From the New York Times, October 22:
Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75 percent of its operations.
Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.
Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.
Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.
Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.
At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of its operations.
Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a “good corporate citizen” through greater participation in community events such as parades and Toys for Tots.
The documents contemplate avoiding using terms like “automation” and “A.I.” when discussing robotics, and instead use terms like “advanced technology” or replace the word “robot” with “cobot,” which implies collaboration with humans.
Amazon said in a statement that the documents viewed by The Times were incomplete and did not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy. Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the documents reflected the viewpoint of one group inside the company and noted that Amazon planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season, though the company declined to say how many of those roles would be permanent.
Amazon also said that it’s not insisting executives avoid certain terms, and that community involvement is unrelated to automation.
Amazon’s plans could have profound impact on blue-collar jobs throughout the country and serve as a model for other companies like Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, and UPS. The company transformed the U.S. work force as it created a booming demand for warehousing and delivery jobs. But now, as it leads the way for automation, those roles could become more technical, higher paid and more scarce.
“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.”....
....MUCH MORE
The little orange robots that led the way:
June 2016"In 2012 Jeff Bezos scooped up warehouse automation firm Kiva. Everyone else is still trying to catch up" (AMZN)
Amazon’s $775 Million Acquisition of Kiva Systems Could Shift How Businesses See Robots
One Last Note on Amazon: How Many Companies Brag About the Number of Robots They've Added? (AMZN)
Mail.ru's Dmitry Grishin Doubles Down on Robotics With New $100 Million Fund
"Could Automation Be Labor Unions' Death Knell?"
And hundreds more on Amazon, use the search blog box if interested.
Picking, packing and moving, here's the latter:
May 2022 - Amazon's $1 Billion Industrial Innovation Fund: They Like Robots (AMZN)
