Amazon has taken a new step in its strategy extreme optimization of its infrastructure, and has put automation at the center.
According to leaked internal documents to The New York Timesthe company seeks to automate up to 75% of its global operations by the end of this decade, a measure that could have a direct impact on the employment of its logistics and delivery centers.
The economic logic behind robots. In the leaked Amazon documents it is estimated that with the introduction of new generations of rautonomous robots In its facilities, it will be possible to eliminate up to 160,000 direct jobs in the US by 2027, and avoid hiring more than 600,000 additional workers that the company estimates it would need to meet its objectives in 2033.
Amazon’s internal calculations detail that automation would allow an average saving of 30 cents on each item purchased in the Amazon store until 2027 and they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. Which according to estimates, could mean a saving of about 12.6 billion dollars for the next two years, improving the initial forecasts of 10 billion dollars.
Logistics centers 2.0. The Amazon work documents you’ve had access to The New York Times indicate that the plan not only aims at direct cost savings, but also aims to achieve these savings by carrying out a complete restructuring of the warehouses.
Amazon has tripled its workforce since 2018, and currently has 1.2 million employees. Many of them are busy in their logistics centers in repetitive areas such as packaging. Amazon’s intention is automate all these processes with robots and leaving humans only the tasks of technical development and supervision.
According to estimates, only with the implementation of robots in these positions, current sales volumes could be maintained using 40% fewer staff. “No one else has the same incentive as Amazon to find a way to automate. Once they figure out how to do it profitably, it will spread to others as well,” he told The New York Times Daron AcemogluNobel Prize in Economics in 2024.
The Canary in the Mine: Shreveport. Amazon’s obsession with robotizing all its processes is not new. In 2012, Amazon paid 775 million dollars by Kiva Systems, a company that was then dedicated to manufacturing mobile robots to move shelves in warehouses. With them, it applied a first layer of automation to its logistics centers between 2018 and 2019, so that its employees no longer had to walk kilometers between shelves preparing orders. Now orders arrived on robots to the packing points.
In 2023 Amazon inaugurated your most advanced warehouse in Shreveport (Louisiana) as a laboratory for what all Amazon’s robotic logistics centers will be in the future. in that warehousewhen a product goes into an order, humans barely touch it again. To do this, Amazon has designed an infrastructure with a thousand robots that have allowed it to operate with 25% staff.
As shown by the documents to which he has had access The New York TimesBy increasing the number of robots, the number of employees could be reduced by 50%. Amazon plans to bring the Shreveport model to 40 of the company’s fulfillment centers by 2027, dramatically reducing staffing needs at those locations.
Who will work at Amazon? amazon claims to have a million robots of different nature deployed in their logistics centers. If these robots are going to take the place of a human, will theywho is going to work at Amazon? Andy Jassy, CEO of the company, is clear: the humans who program, care for and repair them will be the employees of the future.
According to the American media, in the Shreveport center there are more than 160 people dedicated to these robotics tasks, and their salaries start at $24.45 per hour. In contrast, the more than 2,000 employees who manage and pack orders have a salary of $19.50 per hour. That is, Amazon aims to be a job center not for low-skilled workers, but for robotics engineers and technicians.
Amazon’s response. Given the news, Amazon spokespersons have rushed to qualify the information from the Times claiming: “Leaked documents often present an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that is the case. In our written narrative culture, thousands of documents circulate throughout the company at any given time, each with varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness,” declared to The Verge Kelly Nantel.
The Amazon spokeswoman added: “We are actively hiring at operating facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season.”
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