In one publish, Amazon highlighted Blue Jay, a robotic it calls “an additional set of fingers that helps staff 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 cut back bottlenecks.
Blue Jay can transfer 75 p.c of the forms 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 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 true 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 staff 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 few of the jobs which might be being completed at the moment, and extra folks doing different forms of jobs. It’s arduous to know precisely the place this nets out over time, however within the subsequent few years, we anticipate that it will cut back our whole company workforce as we get effectivity good points 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 staff who more and more will give attention to taking good care of the robots.
