Amazon is not wasting any time on its future ambitions for automation and how artificial intelligence (AI) technology could reshape its workforce.
The e-commerce giant aims to sell twice as many products by 2033 without adding to its U.S. workforce — a shift that could mean more than 600,000 jobs Amazon would not need to fill, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Amazon’s chief technologist, Tye Brady, told FOX Business on Wednesday that employees currently working at Amazon won’t lose their jobs to robots — instead, the new technology is designed to work alongside humans.
AMAZON HIRING 250,000 WORKERS FOR UPCOMING HOLIDAY SEASON
“So of the speculative hiring, it’s still speculation, right? But I do know this – I do know that we will continue to amplify what our employees can do by giving them the best tool set possible. That’s using physical A.I. systems in order to create a safer environment and more productive environment for employees,” Brady said in an interview that aired on “Mornings with Maria.”
Documents reviewed by the Times reportedly showed that Amazon’s robotics team has a long-term goal of automating 75% of its operations.
“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,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told Fox News Digital.
“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,” Nantel added.
In 2024, Amazon’s logistics division processed roughly 6.3 billion U.S. delivery orders — about 17.2 million per day, or more than 717,000 per hour — according to research by Capital One Shopping.
On Wednesday, Amazon is hosting a “Delivering the Future” event at a delivery station in Milpitas, Calif., where the company plans to unveil new robotics and AI technologies to improve its delivery process.
This comes on the heels of a massive Amazon Web Services outage this week that impacted various external websites and even disrupted package deliveries, some Amazon customers claimed.
“It’s hard to say exactly what the scale of that impact [was]. I know that we have recovery systems in mind. Whenever something like that does happen, we can revert back to the local cloud that’s inside of our building, if you want to think of it that way,” Brady explained. “We did see a major impact across our deliveries, but we know that our customers had a major impact there and we take that really seriously.”
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