Amazon is now using more than one million robots in its warehouses, the most it has ever deployed, and there are now nearly as many robots in Amazon facilities as there are people, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Robots assist in a variety of functions, ranging from sorting items to packaging them for shipment. For example, a new robot named Vulcan can select products from different shelves to be packaged. Amazon told the WSJ that 75% of its global deliveries, or three in four packages, are facilitated in some way by robotics.
As Amazon relies more on robots for order fulfillment, it needs fewer human employees on staff. Amazon employs about 1.56 million people, with most working in warehouses. According to a WSJ analysis, the average number of employees per Amazon facility dropped to 670 people per warehouse last year, the lowest count in the past 16 years. It also found that Amazon employees are now more productive than they were a decade ago — the number of packages shipped per employee has skyrocketed from 175 in 2015 to about 3,870 last year.
Amazon leadership confirmed that the company is using AI to improve operations in its warehouses and potentially cut down its number of employees. In a memo to employees sent last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated that the company was “using AI to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots.”
Jassy wrote that as Amazon rolls out more AI features to its robots, the company “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” which will “reduce” Amazon’s workforce over the “next few years.”
Still, the company told the WSJ that it has trained more than 700,000 workers globally through apprenticeships for jobs that involve working with robots, such as robot technicians.
