Amazon aims to replace over half a million US jobs with robots: report

Amazon is planning to replace more than half a million jobs in the US with robots, according to a new report.

Warehouse automation will enable the e-commerce giant to avoid hiring over 600,000 people in the coming years, executives told Amazon’s board in 2024, according to the New York Times.

That’s even though the company reportedly expects to sell twice as many products by 2033.

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The shift from human to robot is expected to unfold over the coming years, according to Tuesday’s article.

Amazon plans to avoid hiring over 160,000 US workers by 2027 – saving the company about 30 cents on each item it ships — the report stated. Hundreds of thousands of additional roles will be automated by 2033.

Ultimately, the firm’s robotics team is looking to automate 75% of operations, according to the Times.

“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told The Post in a statement. 

“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.”

Nantel added that Amazon plans to hire 250,000 people for the upcoming holiday season, but did not share how many of those positions will be permanent.

If Amazon does cut back on hiring, it would represent a sharp turnaround in the company’s growth strategy.

Since 2018, it has more than tripled its US workforce to nearly 1.2 million people — making Amazon the second-largest employer in the country.

The firm is already plotting ways to reduce the backlash in communities that might lose out on warehouse jobs, according to the Times.

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Internal documents reportedly reveal Amazon has discussed building an image as a “good corporate citizen” in these communities through larger participation in events like parades and Toys for Tots.

In the documents, Amazon also weighed whether it should avoid terms like “automation” and “AI” when discussing robotics – instead opting for “advanced technology” or the term “cobot” instead of “robot” to imply collaboration with humans, per the report.

An Amazon spokesperson told The Post there is no company directive to avoid these terms.

A big concern is that other major employers, like Walmart and UPS, could follow in Amazon’s footsteps, according to Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation.

“Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too,” he told the Times. Then, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”

Another concern is that people of color will be disproportionately impacted by the lack of warehouse jobs. Amazon’s warehouse workers are roughly three times as likely as a typical US employee to be black, the Times reported.

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The company has already transformed some warehouses. At its most advanced facility, located in Shreveport, La., items rarely pass through human hands again once they are packaged. Instead, a thousand robots handle the shipments through the rest of the process, according to the report.

Amazon is able to employ a quarter fewer warehouse workers in Shreveport than it would have without bots, according to documents obtained by the Times.

As more robots are added next year, the company plans to employ half as many workers in Shreveport, the report stated.

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“With this major milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote earlier this year, according to the Times.

The company is reportedly looking to copy this approach in about 40 facilities by the end of 2027.

It has also started retrofitting old warehouses, like one in Stone Mountain near Atlanta, which will need as many as 1,200 fewer employees after it is automated, according to internal documents.

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Some Amazon staffers have strategized on how to “control the narrative” around the retrofit by focusing on new technician roles and “innovation to give local officials a sense of pride,” according to the documents obtained by the Times.

The article did not touch on Amazon’s plans for its workers outside the US.

Amazon said some facilities will have more human workers after they are retrofitted. 

Udit Madan, who runs Amazon’s global operations, told the Times that the company has used savings from automation in the past to create new jobs.

“That you have efficiency in one part of the business doesn’t tell the whole story for the total impact it might have,” he said, “either in a particular community or for the country overall.”