[ed. Amazon announces 14000 job cuts - 10/28/2025]
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.
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’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.”
If the plans pan out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” Mr. Acemoglu said.
The Times viewed internal Amazon documents from the past year. They included working papers that show how different parts of the company are navigating its ambitious automation effort, as well as formalized plans for the department of more than 3,000 corporate and engineering employees who largely develop the company’s robotic and automation operations. (...)
A Template for the Future
For years, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and longtime chief executive, pushed his staff to think big and envision what it would take to fully automate its operations, according to two former senior leaders involved in the work. Amazon’s first big push into robotic automation started in 2012, when it paid $775 million to buy the robotics maker Kiva. The acquisition transformed Amazon’s operations. Workers no longer walked miles crisscrossing a warehouse. Instead, robots shaped like large hockey pucks moved towers of products to employees.
The company has since developed an orchestrated system of robotic programs that plug into each together like Legos. And it has focused on transforming the large, workhorse warehouses that pick and pack the products customers buy with a click.
Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse, a facility in Shreveport, La., last year as a template for future robotic fulfillment centers. Once an item there is in a package, a human barely touches it again. The company uses a thousand robots in Shreveport, allowing it to employ a quarter fewer workers last year than it would have without automation, documents show. Next year, as more robots are introduced, it expects to employ about half as many workers there as it would without automation.
“With this major milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote in its strategy plan for 2025.
Amazon plans to copy the Shreveport design in about 40 facilities by the end of 2027, starting with a massive warehouse that just opened in Virginia Beach. And it has begun overhauling old facilities, including one in Stone Mountain near Atlanta.
That facility currently has roughly 4,000 workers. But once the robotic systems are installed, it is projected to process 10 percent more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees, according to an internal analysis. Amazon said the final head count was subject to change. (...)
Amazon has said it has a million robots at work around the globe, and it believes the humans who take care of them will be the jobs of the future. Both hourly workers and managers will need to know more about engineering and robotics as Amazon’s facilities operate more like advanced factories.
by Karen Weise, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Emily Kask
[ed. Everyone knew this was coming, now it's here. I expect issues like universal basic income, healthcare for all, even various forms of democratic socialism (which I support) getting more attention soon. See also: What Amazon’s 14,000 job cuts say about a new era of corporate downsizing (WaPo via Seattle Times); and, The AI job cuts are here - or are they? (BBC).]
