Karen Weise

How do they respond?

So in this period, Amazon gets a new CEO.

Jeff Bezos becomes executive chairman, and Andy Jassy, who had run the very profitable cloud computing unit, now runs all of Amazon.

And he starts focusing very intently on cutting costs.

And part of that was really trying to look at how can they advance automation further.

And the automation and robotics team sets this ambitious goal to not just augment the work that workers are doing, but to replace them.

And that plan is not hypothetical.

I mean, it is happening now and it is being rolled out around the country.

So that looks like a warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, that I went to a couple weeks ago.

And this is the most advanced warehouse Amazon has, and they see it as a template for future warehouses.

Now we are going to the east side of the building and that is where we are going to see how we bring in freight.

So when I got there, the head of the warehouse, the manager took me on a tour of the building.

So we have a first floor, and then you have four floors on top.

And it's brand new, it's bright, it's very tall, it's five stories, and you walk inside and it's super clean.

We have about a thousand robots in the building.

A thousand, okay.

Yeah.

And there's this loud, constant humming of the conveyor belts.

Turns out there's more than 13 miles of conveyor belts in that building.

But it was also kind of calm because it wasn't chaotic.