SHREVEPORT, La. — Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its rise to become the country’s second-largest employer, it hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered the use of technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.
Now, interviews and a set of internal strategy documents seen by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big change in the workplace: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.
Amazon’s U.S. workforce has more than tripled since 2018, reaching nearly 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team hopes the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States by 2027 that would otherwise be needed. This would save about 30 cents on every item Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.
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Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid expanding its U.S. workforce in the coming years, even as it expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate into more than 600,000 people Amazon wouldn’t need to hire.
In facilities designed for super-fast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal of automating 75% of its operations.
Amazon is so convinced that this automated future is near that it has begun developing plans to mitigate the impacts on communities that could lose jobs. Documents show the company considered building a “good corporate citizen” image through greater participation in community events such as parades and the Toys for Tots campaign.
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The documents suggest avoiding terms like “automation” and “artificial intelligence” when discussing robotics, instead using terms like “advanced technology” or replacing the word “robot” with “cobot,” which implies collaboration with humans.
Amazon said in a statement that the documents seen by the Times were incomplete and did not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy. Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the documents reflected the views of a group within the company and noted that Amazon planned to hire 250,000 people for the upcoming holiday season, although the company declined to say how many of those positions would be permanent.
Amazon also said it is not requiring executives to avoid certain terms and that community engagement is not related to automation.
Amazon’s plans could have a profound impact on blue-collar jobs across the country and serve as a model for other companies like Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, and UPS. The company transformed the U.S. workforce by creating a growing demand for warehouse and delivery jobs. But now, as we lead the way toward automation, these roles may become more technical, better paid, and scarcer.
“No one else has the same incentive as Amazon to find a way to automate,” said Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences last year. “Once they figure out how to do it profitably, it will spread to others as well.”
If the plans come to fruition, “one of the largest employers in the United States will become a net destroyer of jobs, not a net creator of jobs,” Acemoglu said.
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The Times has seen internal Amazon documents from the past year. They included work in progress that shows how different parts of the company are navigating its ambitious automation effort, as well as formalized plans for the department of more than 3,000 corporate and engineering employees who largely power the company’s robotics and automation operations.
Udit Madan, who leads Amazon’s worldwide operations, said in an interview that the company has a long history of using savings from automation to create new jobs, such as a recent effort to open more delivery warehouses in rural areas.
“Just because you have efficiencies in one part of the business doesn’t tell the whole story of the total impact it can have,” he said, “whether it’s on a specific community or for the country as a whole.”
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Model for the future
For years, Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, encouraged his team to think big and imagine what it would take to fully automate their operations, according to two former senior leaders involved in the work. Amazon’s first big push into robotic automation began in 2012, when it paid $775 million to buy robot maker Kiva. The acquisition transformed Amazon’s operations. Workers no longer had to walk miles across a warehouse. Instead, robots shaped like large hockey pucks moved towers of product to employees.
Since then, the company has developed an orchestrated system of robotic programs that connect like Lego bricks. And it has focused on transforming the large warehouses that select and package the products that customers buy with one click.
Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse, a facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, last year as a model for future robotic fulfillment centers. Once an item is packed there, a human barely touches it again. The company uses 1,000 robots in Shreveport, allowing it to employ a quarter fewer workers last year than it would have without automation, documents show. Next year, with more robots, it expects to employ about half the workers it would have without automation.
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“With this important milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote in its 2025 strategic plan.
Amazon plans to copy Shreveport’s design in about 40 facilities by the end of 2027, starting with a massive warehouse it just opened in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And it began renovating aging facilities, including one in Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta.
That facility currently has about 4,000 workers. But once the robotic systems are installed, they are projected to process 10% more items but require up to 1,200 fewer employees, according to an internal analysis. Amazon said the final number of employees is subject to change.
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A million robots
Amazon’s automation plans have become more urgent after the surge in online shopping during the pandemic, which sent Amazon on a hiring spree unprecedented in U.S. corporate history. Madan said the company has embarked on a complete redesign of its typical warehouses.
In March 2024, when executives working on automation plans gave a presentation to Amazon’s board, directors pressed them to do more with less. By fall, the robotics team had made progress. Reduced the cost of the automation plan to less than $10 billion and increased expected savings to $12.6 billion from 2025 to 2027.
Andy Jassy, who took over as CEO in July 2021 when Bezos left, has been pushing to cut costs across the e-commerce business. “For years, they’ve really been investing to grow, and in the last three years the company’s focus has shifted to efficiency,” said Justin Post, a Bank of America analyst who has covered Amazon for two decades. Robotics “really makes a big difference in the end result.”
Amazon said it has 1 million robots working around the world, and it believes humans caring for them will be the jobs of the future. Both hourly workers and managers will need to know more about engineering and robotics as Amazon facilities operate more like advanced factories.
At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, earning at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers whose pay starts at $19.50.
Training workers for these new roles is “something close to my heart,” Madan said. He pointed to data showing that nearly 5,000 people have gone through Amazon’s mechatronics apprenticeship program since 2019. “It could be a very successful path,” he said.
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