After the AI boom, tech giants have been transforming at a rapid scale and moving their operations towards automation. Working with AI, replacing some human driven operations with robot technology or just changing how working pattern can be evolved are some of the ways companies are adopting change. Amazon has been the latest to transform its human driven operations with AI. The New York Times said in a report that Amazon is working to use robots for more than 600,000 jobs which would otherwise need a higher number of human employees. The company is planning to make the switch by 2033.

The documents also suggested that Amazon’s robotics team is working to shift around 75 per cent of the total operations in the company to automation and slash  around 1,60,000 jobs that are expected to be filled by 2027. In the area of finances as well, there are reports that Amazon will be able to save around 30 cents on each item delivered by the warehouses of the e-commerce giant to consumers. When all the required operations will be automated, the total automation in the company is estimated to save USD 12.6 billion from 2025 to 2027.

Till now, Amazon has been taking initiatives to keep its image as a citizen friendly corporate, which will play a big role in protecting the company’s image against the potential backlash from the automation work that will span a scale big enough to outnumber more than half a million jobs and affecting a large part of the economy. Additionally, to maintain this image of a good company, Amazon is involving itself in community projects voraciously, and is cautiously avoiding the usage of terms like AI and Automation. 

In a major step to integrate AI and robot technology in a way to avoid backlash and not portray itself as a company that is advancing without taking youth and other employees along with it. So, Amazon has been using terms like cobot, meaning a robot that works alongside humans.

In a reply to NYT’s report, Amazon said in an official statement that the leaked documents show distorted truth and not actually the overall hiring strategy of Amazon. Meanwhile, the company also rejected the claims, according to which, the officials being asked by the company to refrain from using particular terms while talking about robotics. However, Daron Acemoglu said, ‘Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate. Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.’ He further said that if Amazon achieves the goal of automation, then ‘one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.’