Amazon.com Inc. plans to replace more than half-a-million jobs in the United States with robots, the New York Times reported citing internal strategy documents and interviews with executives, as America’s second largest employer “is on the cusp of the its next big workplace shift”.
Amazon’s US workforce has more than tripled since 2018 to 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team believes the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the US it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers.
In all, Amazon is planning to replace and/or avoid 600,000 jobs by 2027.
Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its US workforce, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033.
Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that its robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75% of its operations. The documents avoid using terms like “automation” and “artificial intelligence” when discussing robotics, and instead use terms like “advanced technology” or replace the word “robot” with “cobot”, which implies collaboration with humans.
“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year, told NYT. If the plans pan out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator”.
Amazon said that the documents viewed by NYT were incomplete and did not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy. Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, noted that the company planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season.
Amazon Layoffs
The talks of fewer jobs at the warehouse come amid layoffs in the office.
- In May, 100 employees were let go from its devices and services division, which includes Alexa devices to Echo speakers and Ring doorbells.
- In January, dozens of workers in its communications department were laid off to help the company “move faster, increase ownership, strengthen our culture, and bring teams closer to customers”.
- Within Amazon Web Services, an outage at which brought down “half the internet” a couple of days back, the company has “eliminted some roles across particular teams”.
- In the HR division, which has over 10,000 employees globally, Amazon is reported to be planning to cut up to 15% of staff.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has publicly stated that as Amazon deploys more AI agents and automation, “we will need fewer people doing some jobs that are being done today… We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains”.
To be sure, Amazon has not released a comprehensive figure for layoffs in 2025, but has reduced its workforce by 27,000 since the start of 2022.