Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation's second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon's U.S. workforce has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon's automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers.

Executives told Amazon's board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. workforce in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033.

At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon's robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75% of its operations.

The documents contemplate avoiding using terms like "automation" and "artificial intelligence" when discussing robotics, and instead use terms like "advanced technology" or replace the word "robot" with "cobot," which implies collaboration with humans.

"Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate," said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year. If the plans pan out, "one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator," Acemoglu said.

Amazon said that the documents viewed by the Times were incomplete and did not represent the company's overall hiring strategy. Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, noted that the company planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season.

"That you have efficiency in one part of the business doesn't tell the whole story for the total impact it might have," said Udit Madan, who leads worldwide operations for Amazon, "either in a particular community or for the country overall."