Amazon.com apparently hopes to replace 600.000 US employees with robots

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In the USA, Amazon.com is reportedly pushing automation with robots so far that the online retailer will need to hire more than half a million fewer employees in the coming years. This is reported by the New York Times, citing interviews with employees and internal strategy papers. According to the report, Amazon.com could replace over 600.000 US employees with robots by 2033, even though the company aims to double the number of products sold by then.

The documents reportedly show that Amazon.com's robotics team is working to automate 75 percent of its entire operations. This could allow the online retailer to save 160.000 jobs within the next two years. This would result in Amazon.com saving around 30 cents per item delivered from warehouses to customers. In total, the company could save 12.6 billion US dollars through automation from 2025 to 2027.

Robots already common at Amazon

As early as July this year, it was reported that Amazon employs over a million robots, which support almost 1.6 million human employees. This means the number of robots is slowly approaching the number of working people at Amazon. So far, robots are primarily used in logistics, but the company is reportedly already working on expanding and reportedly trains humanoid robots for package delivery.

To improve its public image in anticipation of job cuts and the expected backlash, Amazon is working according to the New York Times to present itself as a "responsible, social, and ethical company." The company intends to participate in non-profit projects and publicly avoid terms such as "automation" and "AI." Instead, coinages like "advanced technology" and "cobots" instead of "robots" would be used to emphasize human-robot collaboration.

Amazon denies specific plans

When asked, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel explained to The Verge that the internal documents merely represent the opinion of a single team. This would in no way represent the personnel strategy of the company as a whole, neither now nor in the future. "Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that is the case here," she said. "Thousands of documents circulate within the company at any given time in our written narrative culture, each with varying degrees of accuracy and currency."

"We are actively hiring in our facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250.000 positions for the holiday season," Nantel added. Furthermore, Amazon.com denied to the New York Times that employees are instructed to avoid certain terms related to robots. Participation in community projects is also unrelated to the company's automation plans.

Warning from economic expert

However, according to economic experts, automation is an important goal, especially for online retailers. "No one else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the path to automation," said Turkish-American economist and winner of last year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Daron Acemoğlu, to the New York Times. "Once they figure out how to implement this profitably, it will spread to others as well." If Amazon.com achieves its automation goals, "one of the largest employers in the United States would become a net job destroyer rather than a net job creator."

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