Amazon Aims to Replace 600,000 Workers With Robots

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the world, with 1.5 million workers, is accelerating its use of warehouse robots as part of a major automation drive, The New York Times reported on Monday. The move could replace 600,000 human jobs by 2033.

Robots help Amazon warehouse workers with tasks ranging from sorting items to packaging them for shipment. For example, a new robot named Vulcan can pick items from different shelves to be packaged. Amazon told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that it utilizes robots in 75% of its deliveries.

The Times viewed leaked internal Amazon documents showing that the company is exploring building and using more robots to replace human workers. It’s unclear if the move will result in mass layoffs. However, the robots would allow for a hiring freeze — Amazon will not have to hire new employees to meet increased demand for its products, according to the documents.

That means Amazon will not have to hire more than 600,000 people over the next eight years, thanks to robots filling in the gaps, even though the company expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. Amazon did not previously announce that it was planning to hire that many people; the leaked documents showed that figure.

By 2027, 160,000 warehouse jobs may disappear as machines take over picking and packing tasks. That would save about 30 cents on each product that the company selects, packs and delivers to customers’ doorsteps, according to the leaked documents.

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According to the report, Amazon is using its Shreveport, Louisiana, warehouse as a template. The warehouse has already reduced staffing needs by 25% due to automation, with similar models planned nationwide. At the Shreveport facility, once an item is in a package, robots take over with little need for human assistance to get the package out the door. The location uses about 1,000 robots, with plans to introduce more next year.

Amazon, which has been using robots in its warehouses for over a decade, saw its U.S. workforce more than triple since 2018, reaching 1.2 million workers, according to the Times. The company expects to save $12.6 billion in labor costs between 2025 and 2027 due to automation.

Amazon said in a statement to the Times that the leaked internal documents do not show the company’s entire hiring strategy, clarifying that those reports reflect only the viewpoint of one internal group. According to spokesperson Kelly Nantel, Amazon plans to hire 250,000 additional people for the upcoming holiday season, although she declined to specify how many of these positions would be temporary.

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A 2020 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) measured the impact of robotic automation on jobs. The study found that for every robot added per 1,000 workers, U.S. wages decline by 0.42%. Robots had replaced an estimated 400,000 jobs at the time of the study’s publication.

If Amazon’s automation plans work out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Prize in the economic sciences last year, told the Times.

Amazon stated earlier this year that it uses more than one million robots in its warehouses, the most it has ever deployed, making the number of robots nearly equal to the number of human employees.

According to Amazon’s annual proxy statement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this year, the median global Amazon employee made $37,181 in 2024. The same document showed that the median U.S. Amazon full-time worker made about $10,000 more per year, or $47,990.

Related: Here’s How Much Money Amazon Employees — From Software Engineers to Product Managers — Make in a Year

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the world, with 1.5 million workers, is accelerating its use of warehouse robots as part of a major automation drive, The New York Times reported on Monday. The move could replace 600,000 human jobs by 2033.

Robots help Amazon warehouse workers with tasks ranging from sorting items to packaging them for shipment. For example, a new robot named Vulcan can pick items from different shelves to be packaged. Amazon told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that it utilizes robots in 75% of its deliveries.