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Amazon will soon use more robots in its warehouses than human employees — with more than 1 million machines already deployed across facilities, according to a report.
Many of these robots cover the heavy lifting involved in warehouse work, picking items down from tall shelves and moving goods around facilities.
Others are advanced enough to help humans sort and package orders, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Three-quarters of Amazon’s global deliveries are now assisted in some way by robots, according to the company.
“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Rueben Scriven, research manager at robotics consulting firm Interact Analysis, told the Journal.
Amazon said the robots have allowed them to free up workers for more skilled tasks and cut down on repetition.
“Since introducing robots within Amazon’s operations, we’ve continued to hire hundreds of thousands of employees to work in our facilities and created many new job categories worldwide, including positions like flow control specialists, floor monitors, and reliability maintenance engineers,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Post.
At a 3-million-square-foot facility in Shreveport, La., more than six dozen robotic arms sort and stack millions of items.
They prepare carts to be loaded onto trucks and package paper bags for orders.
These advanced bots work in tandem with human workers at the Louisiana warehouse, handing products to employees to fill orders and reaching for hard-to-grab items inside shelves as workers supervise.
Products whizz through this facility 25% faster than at other warehouses.
That’s consistent with Amazon’s overall productivity, which has soared despite employing fewer workers per facility.
The average number of employees per facility dropped to roughly 670 last year – its lowest level in the past 16 years, according to a Journal analysis.
The number of packages shipped per employee, meanwhile, has risen to 3,870 from just 175 a decade ago, according to the Journal.
Amazon expects its corporate workforce to shrink over the next few years, too, as artificial intelligence turns some jobs completed by humans obsolete, CEO Andy Jassy admitted last month.
“Like with every technical transformation, there will be fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate,” Jassy said Monday, doubling down during an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“But there’s going to be other jobs.”
About 1.56 million people work for Amazon, with most in warehouses.That makes the Jeff Bezos-owned firm the second-largest private employer in the US.
The use of robots has allowed Amazon to improve productivity during periods of high staff turnover, and relegate more repetitive tasks to machines.
Neisha Cruz, an Amazon worker who spent five years picking items at a Windsor, Conn. facility, now does computer work in an Arizona office.
“I thought I was going to be doing heavy lifting, I thought I was going to be walking like crazy,” Cruz told the Journal.
In her new role, she oversees mobile robots across several facilities to ensure they’re working properly – and earns about 2.5 times more than when started at the company.
Amazon said it has trained more than 700,000 global workers for higher-paying jobs that can include working with robotics.
“You have completely new jobs being created,” like robot technicians, Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics, told the Journal.
Dattatreya is leading a new team tasked with implementing artificial intelligence across Amazon robotics, with the goal of machines one day being able to respond to verbal commands, according to the Journal.
Amazon first made the leap into robotics in 2012, when it paid $775 million to buy Kiva Systems, which made robots that could move shelves of products around.
Now the company is in the early stages of testing a humanoid robot with legs, arms and a head for use in warehouse work, according to Amazon.
