Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has developed an aggressive corporate culture and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage workers.Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents reveal that Amazon executives believe their company is on the cusp of their next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.Karen Weise takes us inside Amazon’s push toward automation and the implications for the company and potentially for the broader economy.Guest: Karen Weise, a technology correspondent for The New York Times, based in Seattle.Background reading: Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots.Meet Sparrow, Cardinal and Proteus, the robots powering Amazon’s automation.Photo: Emily Kask for The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other episodes from The Daily
Transcribed and ready to explore now
Congress Failed to Extend the Health Care Subsidies. Now What?
18 Dec 2025
The Daily
The Lonely Work of a Free-Speech Defender
05 Dec 2025
The Daily
How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights
21 Oct 2025
The Daily
A Shutdown Where None of the Normal Rules Apply
17 Oct 2025
The Daily
Zohran Mamdani Explains His Rise
16 Oct 2025
The Daily
The Indictment of James Comey
26 Sep 2025
The Daily