In a single publish, Amazon highlighted Blue Jay, a robotic it calls “an additional set of arms that helps workers with duties that contain reaching and lifting,” and its agentic AI system Venture Eluna, which “acts like an additional teammate, serving to cut back that cognitive load” whereas optimizing sorting to scale back bottlenecks.
Blue Jay can transfer 75 p.c of the varieties of objects Amazon shops, and is finally speculated to be a “core expertise” powering Similar-Day supply websites. The corporate says it developed Blue Jay in simply over a yr primarily based on AI, digital twins, and knowledge from robots already in use, making a system that “coordinates a number of robotic arms to carry out many duties without delay, collapsing what was three separate robotic stations into one streamlined workspace that may choose, stow, and consolidate in a single place.”
Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady says within the firm’s publish that, “The actual headline isn’t about robots.. It’s about folks—and the way forward for work we’re constructing collectively.” The weblog publish additionally reiterates a spokesperson’s response to the Occasions report, saying that “no firm has created extra jobs within the U.S. over the previous decade than Amazon,” and touting plans to fill 250,000 positions for the vacation season.
CEO Andy Jassy’s June letter to workers in regards to the influence of effectivity is a bit clearer. He wrote about generative AI, saying, “We are going to want fewer folks doing a number of the jobs which might be being finished right this moment, and extra folks doing different varieties of jobs. It’s laborious to know precisely the place this nets out over time, however within the subsequent few years, we anticipate that this can cut back our whole company workforce as we get effectivity features from utilizing AI extensively throughout the corporate.”
The Occasions report suggests the same plan for robotics and automation, citing Jassy’s push to chop e-commerce prices and displaying examples of how its warehouse overhauls are creating services that course of extra objects with fewer workers who more and more will deal with caring for the robots.
