Amazon will soon deploy more bots than it employs people now that it has a million robots

Rejoice, you giant bags of mostly water, for Amazon has deployed its one millionth bot (via TechCrunch). And by some estimates, that means it is on track to have more robots than human employees.

Wait, Amazon has over a million employees? Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has a 1.56 million-strong throng of human souls, presumably most of them toiling away in fulfilment warehouses.

Along with sheer scale, Amazon is claiming upgraded smarts for its latest bots. "We're also introducing a new generative AI foundation model we've designed to make our entire fleet of robots smarter and more efficient. Called DeepFleet, this AI technology will coordinate the movement of robots across our fulfillment network, improving the travel time of our robotic fleet by 10% and enabling us to deliver packages to customers faster and at lower costs," the company says.

If this all sounds like bad news for we humans, the Wall Street Journal claims otherwise. It cites examples of menial, repetitive work being replaced by bots, with humans occupying more rewarding and better-paid oversight roles.

“I thought I was going to be doing heavy lifting, I thought I was going to be walking like crazy,” the WSJ quotes Neisha Cruz, who spent five years picking items at an Amazon warehouse in Windsor, Connecticut.

She has since been trained in a robotic oversight role, and the WSJ says she earns 2.5 times as much as before. How typical that is of the Amazon experience is very hard to say.

Overall, the WSJ claims that Amazon has increased the number of packages shipped per employee per year from around 175 in 2015 to 3,870 today. A quick bit of maths puts that at about six billion packages per year.

Frankly, the numbers get silly pretty fast as soon as you look at almost anything Amazon does. And it's very hard to know what the long-term positives and negatives of it all will be. But more bots seem to be the one fairly safe assumption.

Best PC build 2025

👉Check out our list of guides👈

1. Best CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

2. Best motherboard: MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi

3. Best RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB DDR5-7200

4. Best SSD: WD_Black SN7100

5. Best graphics card: RTX 5070 Ti or RX 9070 XT (whichever is cheaper)

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.