Karen Weise

They have been automating and using robotics for more than a decade.

But what happened is they became this enormous employer.

In 2018, they had fewer than 400,000 U.S.

employees to more than a million in just a couple years.

So they became so big, it became expensive and hard to keep that many people cycling through their buildings.

And so you see a focus now on not augmenting workers, but actually avoiding hiring people so that you are actually ultimately trying to bring down the total number of people that you have.

And the other thing that changed is

These investments in technology they've been making over the years began clicking.

You know, it takes several years to develop strong robotic systems that actually work.

And they've reached a point where they feel like these different systems are working, they're working together, and they can begin rolling them out at scale.

Yeah, it does have to do with the robots because they are getting more sophisticated and more capable because of AI.

But it also has to do with the desire to cut costs because Amazon is spending so much money building AI, building data centers, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars.

And so they need cash.

Got it.

So if you go back even to 2012, at the time they had a handful of warehouses around the country.

They started with books, obviously, and moved into CDs.

And so they had a growing variety of products.

And Amazon, they have this idea that drives everything, that consumers always want things faster, they want them cheaper, and they want bigger selection.

And so they start focusing on these three things, and all of those end up coming back to the warehouses because they need space to be able to sell things and hold the inventory, particularly when they started letting merchants sell products on their website.

Delivering things quickly, that's all about how fast they can fulfill the orders and get them to customers.