Compiled 22 October, updated 4 November 2025
Over the past two decades, no company has helped shape the American workplace more than Amazon. In its rise as the country’s second largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, created an army of contract drivers, and pioneered the use of technology to hire, track, and manage employees.
Now, interviews and a series of internal strategy documents viewed by the New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the verge of the next big change in the workplace: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.
Amazon’s US workforce has more than tripled since 2018, reaching nearly 1.2 million. However, Amazon’s automation team predicts that the company will be able to avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the US by 2027. This would save about 30 cents on every item Amazon picks, packs, and delivers to customers.
Amazon’s management hopes to continue to avoid adding to its US workforce in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. This would translate into more than 600,000 people that Amazon did not need to hire…
Apparently, this was Jeff Bezos’ ‘big dream’: to make Amazon ultra-technological. And indeed Amazon ‘s first big push into robotic automation began in 2012, when it paid $775 million to buy robotics manufacturer Kiva. The acquisition transformed Amazon’s operations: no longer workers making miles but robots preparing products for delivery.
This is a strong signal for the market and especially for the big rival -Walmart which is already making great efforts to increase its productivity.
Through warehouses, AI drones , IoT and RFID sensors.
Read also:
