UPDATE Wednesday, 12:15 p.m. ET: This story includes a statement from Amazon responding to the New York Times article.
Retail giant Amazon sees more robots and fewer human employees in its future, according to a blockbuster report in the New York Times.
Referencing employee interviews and internal documents, the Times found that the Seattle-based company hopes to replace more than a half million jobs with robots. The company’s goal, according to the documents, is to eventually automate 75 percent of its operations.
Currently, Amazon is the nation’s second-largest employer, with about 1.5 million workers around the globe. The company has been on a growth trajectory for years, especially once COVID hypercharged online shopping among the public. Even though Amazon is looking to drastically curtail hiring in the coming years, it still expects to sell twice as many products by 2033 as it does now.
Many Amazon workers toil in giant warehouses spread around the world, boxing online orders and shipping them out around the world. But in a new facility in Shreveport, La. built with automation in mind, a thousand robots do much of the packing and shipping work, allowing Amazon to employ a quarter fewer employees than it would without the robots. In 2026, the Louisiana facility will only need half as many employees as it would have before the addition of robots, according to Amazon docs. The operation of the Shreveport facility will be replicated in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027.
The company is already formulating a public relations push to soften the blow of reduced hiring, attrition, or even layoffs, according to the Times. Internal discussions revealed by the paper include greater community involvement by Amazon and changing corporate language from "automation," "AI," and "robot," to "advanced technology" and "cobot" (robots collaborating with humans). The company also reportedly hopes to increase messaging about the creation of new technical jobs tasked with keeping the robots running, though those jobs typically require more training and less human power.
Amazon executives, led by CEO Andy Jassy, are under pressure by Amazon’s board of directors "to do more with less," according to the Times.
"For years and years, they were really investing for growth, and in the last three years the company’s focus has shifted to efficiencies," Wall Street analyst Justin Post told the newspaper.
Amazon’s decision to employ more automation — there are already a million robots at work for the company — will likely disproportionately impact minority workers, especially Black employees; Amazon warehouse workers are about three times as likely as a typical American worker to be Black, the Times reports.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel released the following statement in response to the Times article:
“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here. In our written narrative culture, thousands of documents circulate throughout the company at any given time, each with varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness. In this instance, the materials appear to reflect the perspective of just one team and don't represent our overall hiring strategy across our various operations business lines - now or moving forward. The facts speak for themselves: No company has created more jobs in America over the past decade than Amazon. We're actively hiring at operations facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season.”
For Amazon, the advent of automation potentially presents another upside for shareholders — the robots can’t unionize. The company has long had a strained relationship with organized labor, with the company in September letting go of 150 unionized drivers in New York, allegedly in retaliation for their participation in a workers’ strike. Amazon claimed at the time that the drivers weren’t "fired," but rather victims of canceled contracts with a subcontractor who employed the drivers.
