Karen Weise

It is using the most advanced LLM models to help us make these decisions.

In the tour, I could really see how all these different systems were orchestrated to work together.

You had different types of robotic arms, different ways to move items robotically, and then also just conveyor belts and other machines with humans kind of tapping in and out at different points.

The way the products moved through the building was a whole new way of thinking.

They had completely rethought the way everything operated in the warehouse with this eye to introducing as much automation as possible.

Yes, the automation team said that that facility gave them the confidence that they'll be able to, quote, flatten Amazon's hiring curve in the next 10 years.

Flatten Amazon's hiring curve is corporate speak for stop hiring, right?

Stop hiring.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Even as they expect their business to double, they would need the same number of employees as today.

And so that will mean they're both going to build new warehouses, starting with this as the baseline, and that they're also going to retrofit older warehouses so that they'll need fewer workers to do the same or more work.

They're starting with one in Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta right now.

And that's a more sensitive thing because there you're taking a building that used to have 4,000 employees.

And when you introduce the robotics, they potentially will need 1,200 fewer workers once they're done.

And, you know, Amazon says those numbers are tentative, nothing's final.

But the reason you do this is to reduce your need for labor.

I should note that Amazon isn't disputing this reporting.

There's kind of two main things they have to say.

One is that they say the goals of the automation team don't represent all of the goals of the company.