Amazon is planning to use automation to avoid having to hire 500,000 workers, according to a New York Times report that cites interviews and internal strategy documents.
The documents indicated that Amazon’s robotics team is working towards automating 75% of the company’s entire operations so that the company can cut 160,000 U.S. roles that would otherwise be needed by 2027. This is expected to save Amazon $12.6 billion from 2025 to 2027.
The report also states that Amazon is taking steps to be seen as a “good corporate citizen” in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses. The company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” Vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and the use of the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans was suggested.
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Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement to The Verge that the leaked documents reflect the perspective of just one team, and do not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy “now or moving forward.”
“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here. In our written narrative culture, thousands of documents circulate throughout the company at any given time, each with varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness,” Nantel said. “We’re actively hiring at operations facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season.”
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Amazon also told the NYT that its executives are not being instructed to avoid using certain terms for robots, and that its community projects are unrelated to its automation efforts. However, the report has still given rise to concerns about wage drops and job losses.
“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,” Daron Acemoglu, winner of the Nobel Prize in economic science last year, told NYT. Acemoglu added that if Amazon achieves its automation goal, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”
According to studies, every robot added by a company per 1,000 workers reduces U.S. wages by 0.42% and has cost humans an estimated 400,000 jobs.