In one post, Amazon highlighted Blue Jay, a robotic it calls “an additional set of palms that helps workers with duties that contain reaching and lifting,” and its agentic AI system Undertaking Eluna, which “acts like an additional teammate, serving to scale back that cognitive load” whereas optimizing sorting to cut back bottlenecks.
Blue Jay can transfer 75 % of the varieties of objects Amazon shops, and is ultimately presupposed to be a “core expertise” powering Identical-Day supply websites. The corporate says it developed Blue Jay in simply over a yr based mostly on AI, digital twins, and information from robots already in use, making a system that “coordinates a number of robotic arms to carry out many duties directly, 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 true headline isn’t about robots.. It’s about individuals—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 employees in regards to the affect of effectivity is a bit clearer. He wrote about generative AI, saying, “We are going to want fewer individuals doing among the jobs which are being executed at present, and extra individuals doing different varieties of jobs. It’s onerous to know precisely the place this nets out over time, however within the subsequent few years, we anticipate that this may scale back our complete company workforce as we get effectivity features from utilizing AI extensively throughout the corporate.”
The Occasions report suggests an identical plan for robotics and automation, citing Jassy’s push to chop e-commerce prices and exhibiting examples of how its warehouse overhauls are creating services that course of extra objects with fewer workers who more and more will concentrate on caring for the robots.