Amazon claims its robots aren’t coming for your fulfillment-center job

Last week, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon held its biggest-ever holiday shopping event. To meet the demand and maintain the ultrafast delivery its customers have come to expect while fending off stiff competition, the company has begun retrofitting its 185 fulfillment centers worldwide with a new generation of proprietary robotics systems. Meanwhile, working conditions for the human beings at several of Amazon’s 185 fulfillment centers worldwide have come under fire. In just the past year, employees and former employees at facilities in Atlanta, Staten Island, and Shakopee, Minnesota have accused the company of creating an unsafe environment.

For its part, Amazon has denied any wrongdoing—and further has claimed that its investment in robotics is improving worker safety by reducing repetitive strain injuries and heavy lifting. To learn more about the company’s latest uses of robots and how they’re affecting its human employees, Fast Company recently spoke to Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, on the Most Innovative Companies podcast.

In the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Brady explains Amazon’s next generation of warehouse bots, how they’re improving warehouse conditions, and why he thinks they’re even creating jobs.

How do employees at Amazon’s fulfillment centers work with robots?

I definitely stand by the idea that we put people at the center of our robotics universe. It is a system of people and machines working together to increase our productivity, efficiency, and also increase the safety of our folks.

What are some of the big robotics initiatives you are working on for Amazon’s fulfillment centers?

We’re working on a world-class capability when it comes to the movement of objects, the manipulation of objects, the sorting of objects, the storage of objects, the identification of objects, and the packing of those objects. That’s what we aim to do. Let me give you a few of the big ones that we just rolled out at our latest next-generation fulfillment center, down in Shreveport, Louisiana. We have a large storage cell that we call Sequoia, a containerized storage system of three or four thousand robots working in concert in [a container where we store] the millions of goods that folks are getting ready for the holidays. We can move those goods on demand, using AI systems to actually bring the goods to our pickers and to our stowers, the folks that will actually pack these items. I don’t know if you saw a Proteus, these cute little green robots that work around people to move big parcels of goods to our outbound dock in a very safe and efficient manner.

The Shreveport facility has 10 times more robotics and AI features than other centers. Is that center a blueprint for the future?

First of all, we can create 2,500 new jobs in Shreveport. This is our first real next-generation building, where we’re bringing all these individual products together and integrated under one roof. And when we pull these systems together, we’re seeing a 25% faster order fulfillment compared to our other buildings.

The fulfillment center we visited in Delaware was massive, with 18 football fields’ worth of conveyance. When it comes to robotics, how do you think about filling that space?

The trick in robotics is that it’s not one size fits all. We build our systems to be modular, adaptable to the environment that we have working around people regardless of the scale. We have some really giant buildings as well, up to 3 million square feet. We also have smaller buildings [so we can] bring the goods as close to the customer as we possibly can. When we do that, we can fuel the faster delivery times that our customers love. We can also pass along a low cost to our customers. Our whole aim in robotics is really three key elements: [to have] world’s largest selection of goods, [to have] low cost for our customers, and [to create] ultimate customer convenience. So, we’ll scale our buildings to any size.

When we toured the fulfillment center, there was so much emphasis placed on reducing the risk of injury. How do robotics reduce that risk?

In the last four years, when we really doubled down on automation with this mindset of putting people at the center of the robotics universe, we reduced our recordable injury rate by over 30%—and that’s with increased productivity, increased efficiency. The majority of the equation is how do we extend, augment and amplify our employees’ experience [using robotics]?

How do you get feedback from employees in fulfillment centers?

We insist that we hear directly from our employees about the good things that are working, and the things that are not. The burden is on us to make sure that we’re listening. But also, as a roboticist, I can tell you there’s no such thing as 100% automation. I can tell you that when we roll out these large systems, we need people to understand the big-picture context. We need people to understand why it is not working and how we can make that better.

You talked about robotics reducing the injury rate. Still, there have been reports—like the one from OSHA in 2023—about the high rate of worker injuries at Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Can you give me an example of a robot that has really helped reduce a certain type of strain?

I don’t think we really had a really high amount of injuries. Automation has really helped with that. Let me give you a specific example. We can have variable weights up to 50 pounds inside some of our boxes. So, we have systems like Robin, which is a robot that can automatically pick up heavy boxes and move them into our sort bots. We have another system called Cardinal that can pick up a variety of heavy boxes and play the ultimate game of Tetris, putting them into these containers that we then move onto our trucks. [There’s also a system where] everything is presented right in front of the person so they can pick the right item out of the box. A person doesn’t have to actually get on ladders, reach down on their knees, they don’t have to pick up heavy boxes. They don’t have to do repetitive turns. I’m unabashedly proud of this statement: that we will eliminate every menial, mundane, repetitive task. Because when it becomes repetitive, there can be injury and those are the injuries that we see.

What happened to the employees who performed those jobs?

They’re doing so many other things inside of our buildings. They’re understanding that with a higher focus on how flow of material should happen. They’re commanding their own fleet of robots that they supervise. We’re creating new jobs for people to actually work on robotics and to maintain the robotics.

It sounds like those new jobs that you’re creating require more skills. I know that Amazon offers some free training to its employees. But how many unskilled jobs do you think you’re going to eliminate because of advancements in robotics?

I don’t view it as eliminating jobs. But I do see jobs changing. And it’s really important that we as a society pledge to upskill our employees. The age of generative AI is here. I want to eliminate the mundane, monotonous tasks, but I want to repurpose the people to do other things inside the building. We’ve committed more than $1.2 billion in our 2025 upskilling pledge, for the over 300,000 employees in our network. They get prepaid tuition. Another program that we do is our robotics apprenticeship program.

I want to talk about your partnership with Agility Robotics on their Digit humanoid robot. What are you looking to do through that partnership?

To understand bipedal motion. We have the world’s largest fleet of industrial mobile drives [i.e. robots] out there. We have more than 750,000 of our drive units out there working each and every day. They’re on wheels. What could we do with bipedal movement? We’re learning.

Anyone reading this could be forgiven for being skeptical about Amazon’s claims that it isn’t trying to replace workers. We’re talking about humanoid robots. At some point, are these robots going to be more cost-effective than some of your human employees?

More robots, more jobs. We have the data that proves that. We’ve created hundreds of thousands of new jobs because of our productivity due to robotics. They work together. When you reframe your relationship with people at the center of the robotics universe, what you’re doing is that you’re extending human capability. When you gain revenue, you invest in your robotics so that they can help people. When you do that, you’re actually creating new jobs. People see humanoid robots and they freak out a little bit. I understand that, but when you do it well, it blends seamlessly into the background. In robotics alone, we’ve created more than 700 job categories.

How many of those new jobs require a college degree, or even a specific degree in engineering or computer science?

We hire many folks from community colleges. We hire folks right out of high school. We hire folks with PhDs in robotics. It is all-encompassing when you think about productivity in your particular sector. We launched a study with MIT this year about how workers perceive [the impact of] technology on their pay and their overall wellbeing. We just got the study back. It was very validating for our point of view when it comes to people and machines working together, because we see that when people are exposed to technology, they’re more optimistic about their pay and the benefits. Sixty percent of those folks surveyed were optimistic about the future of AI and the future of robotics.

That survey studied perceptions, not what’s going to happen.

Well, perception matters because if people start to reject the technology, they’re not going to adopt the technology. When they don’t adopt technology, they’re not going to be as productive. Think of [robotics] as a tool that enables people to do their jobs better, more efficiently, more productively. The onus is on us to make sure that we take care of our people.

We’re coming up on the holiday season. Have robotics changed the way Amazon employs seasonal workers?

Our systems are now gaining the ability to upskill new workers more quickly. We also have another upside even for this temporary workforce that’s walking in: A third of them will stay with us for the long-term. If they really are sharing our mission and vision, they stay around.