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Amazon will soon have as many robots as it does humans plugging away at its warehouses, the Wall Street Journal reports. At this rate, it won’t be long until the flesh and blood employees are downright outnumbered.
According to the reporting, Amazon says it’s now deployed an all-time high of more than one million robots at its facilities, putting the bots nearly on par with the number of its human workers. Amazon employs 1.56 million people overall; while it doesn’t specify the exact number that work in its warehouses, the majority of them do.
“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Rueben Scriven, research manager at robotics consulting firm Interact Analysis, told the WSJ.
The Jeff Bezos-chaired company has been experimenting with its mechanical workforce for years now. Today, the robots help with tasks ranging from ferrying packages across the floor and unloading them from trucks to removing items from shelves and even plucking items from the top of storage containers. Recently, Amazon has reportedly begun experimenting with humanoid robots that can ride in delivery vans and hand-deliver packages to customers’ doorsteps.
Around 75 percent of its global deliveries are assisted by robotics in some capacity, the e-commerce giant claims, per the WSJ‘s reporting, and have helped boost productivity. That’s eased some of the pressure of dealing with the high turnover rate — employer jargon for getting fired or quitting a lot — exhibited by the pesky human grunts who work at its grueling fulfillment centers.
The crowning jewel in its automation efforts is Amazon’s new, three million square foot facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, which uses a sprawling, automated inventory management system called Sequoia that serves as the artery of its operations. Per the reporting, Amazon claims it moves products 25 percent faster through its Shreveport facility than it does at other fulfillment centers.
The blistering pace of automation is a worrying prospect coming from a company notorious for its harsh work conditions, wage theft, high rates of turnover, and its hostility towards labor organizers.
Some workers, though, are pleased that the presence of the robots mean they have to do less backbreaking physical work. And Amazon further claims that it’s actually helping to create higher-paying jobs, as positions are needed to supervise the robots.
“I thought I was going to be doing heavy lifting, I thought I was going to be walking like crazy,” Neisha Cruz, who worked for five years as a picker at an Amazon warehouse in Connecticut before being trained to oversee robotic systems, told the WSJ.
“You have completely new jobs being created,” such as robot technicians, added Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics.
In reality, it’s inevitable that the robots will take away human jobs, if they aren’t already doing so. The WSJ found that Amazon had on average 670 workers at each fulfillment center this year, the lowest in the past 16 years. That’s despite the massive boom in the e-commerce industry: the paper also found that the number of packages handled per employee has steadily shot up, going from about 175 in 2016 to about 3,870 in 2025.
And previous reporting from the New York Times pokes a few holes in the idea that new jobs created to oversee the automation technology will come anywhere close to offsetting the jobs destroyed. A manager at one of the company’s robot-laden fulfillment centers told the NYT there were only around 100 jobs related to overseeing the robots out of the 2,500 employees who worked there.
The NYT also suggested that the robots still struggled with numerous essential tasks that come easily to human employees, like sorting through boxes to pick out individual items.
Nonetheless, Amazon is showing no signs of slowing down its robot rollout. When that NYT story came out in November last year, the company said it had about 750,000 machines in operation. Barely half a year later, within touching distance of a million.
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