The Current - What's a 'cobot'? Amazon's plan to replace jobs with robots

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Internal documents suggest Amazon is planning to replace more than half a million workers with robots — and automate 75% of its operations. We speak to Karen Weise, the technology correspondent for The New York Times. Karen spells out what she learned about Amazon's plan — and how they're talking about selling that plan. Hint: A 'cobot' is a collaborative robot. 

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Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. When Amazon opened its new robotics warehouse in Calgary last year, the company said the robots would help employees. Here we have that assistance of robots working alongside with our associates, making their jobs more safer, making their jobs more inclusive, and allowing them basically to develop a career path.

Amazon has been expanding its footprint, in Canada. Just under 50,000 people work for the company in this country. And it's been building new warehouses, some of which are highly automated. Now, the New York Times has obtained internal documents from Amazon, suggesting the company's ultimate goal is to automate 75% of its operations. That could lead to replacing more than half a million workers with robots. Karen Wise is the technology correspondent for the New York Times based in Seattle. She's been covering Amazon since 2018. Aaron, good morning. Good morning. I certainly want to get to this plan and those internal documents in a moment, but first I want to talk about the scale of Amazon. I think we all know it's a really, really big company. But give us a sense of how big? Yeah. I mean, in the United States, Amazon is the second largest private employer, second only to Walmart. And globally, it has more than a million and half workers. So it is just a very large, large employer. And obviously, you know, depending on,

the market, but in kind of Western markets, a very large retailer as well. And even before we get to this question of automation truly taking hold, Amazon has just announced it's cutting back its workforce, 14,000 corporate jobs this year. Sounds as if there are more layoffs to come. What is that about? Yeah, I mean, broadly, this is all part of a pattern of the company trying to operate more efficiently and to be able to save money that they can then, you know, use to lower costs and reinvest in other places and other investments. At the moment right now, they're spending so much money, billions and billions of dollars to build data centers for artificial

intelligence and cloud computing. And so that is putting a lot of pressure on trying to create more efficiencies in other parts of the business to be able to plow the money back into what they see as these really big bets. I mean, there are other things they're investing in as well, but that's an overwhelming priority right now. In your article, you really make a point of how much Amazon, you know, not just a large employer, but shaping the nature of the workforce. You write, over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon.

How so? Yeah, Amazon has really pioneered new ways to kind of hire and manage workers. They've put a lot of focus on making the jobs that they have. have easy to learn. And as a result, they're kind of broken down into very kind of precise, automated tasks. So the ramping up of a new employee is very short. And then people kind of reach their maximum efficiency, if you will. And they use technology to assign workers different roles, to keep track of the pace that they're packing or picking or doing whatever work that they might be doing within a warehouse. They use technology to hire people. There's not a traditional

interview like you might have at another employer. So they've really shaped a new type of employment and other people have been looking to them historically as they have become such a kind of signature employer. They've also, I will say, shaped some of the kind of wage conversations. So in the United States, when they set $15 as their minimum hourly wage, that was a big move at the time. It was more aggressive than particularly retail peers. It was, was higher than them, and it put pressure on them to follow. You write that now Amazon is on the cusp of the next big shift, and this is based on these internal Amazon documents that you were able to see. What did those documents tell you about

what this next big shift will look like? It really kind of laid out the overarching ambition to use automation to limit the number of employees that they'll have to hire in the future. They project out 10 years and look to keep the workforce essentially flat at where it is and to use automation and robotics to increasingly do more and more of the work, even as they expect the business to grow. So kind of bending the hiring curve or hiring avoidance, these are the type of language that was in these documents. And that is starting to happen. They've made a number of advancements that have begun clicking together and that they see a path to being able to roll this out. more widely in the coming years and to make additional advancements on top of that that will enable these greater efficiencies and to be able to fulfill orders for less money.

When you say they want to keep the hiring curve essentially flat, I mean, you're not necessarily talking about a big part of this being layoffs so much as people who won't be hired in the future. Help us understand the significance of that. Is that just neutral or is this a big deal? Well, not having layoffs is definitely what I saw as part of the strategy. There's a few reasons for that. One, layoffs are, they're very politically or kind of unpalatable in local communities. They don't want to be seen as an hourly employer that does that. Also, they can generally manage through attrition because they have very high turnover.

And it's not that hard for them, generally. to predict how much people will fall out of their workforce and then just not rehire behind them. So it's a way that they can kind of manage the shrinking, if you will, over time. And some of it is also just as they open new facilities, they will just from the very beginning be more efficient than an older generation of building might be. And so that's just hiring that you would have had to do otherwise, that you're just not doing instead. But it's clear that the fact that they're not doing layoffs is one of the ways they plan to manage some of the potential community backlash to this. But what is the scale of jobs that

would otherwise have been created and won't be? Yeah. From what I saw, they were looking at 600,000 roles in the United States that they wouldn't need to hire over a decade, even as they expected to sell twice as many items and that if they do, if they keep that kind of headcount flat over that time period. And that's not to say that there couldn't be more advancements coming that make that even a more aggressive target. And I should say now that Amazon's response to my story is not to contest what I've documented, but to say that the company has a history of finding efficiencies and then investing in new businesses. And those new businesses can create new jobs. And so they're saying that this is kind of a partial picture and doesn't represent their

full hiring plan. But when we do look at this part of the picture, I mean, what kinds of jobs are we talking about that would be lost or, I guess in this case, simply never hired for? These are the kind of classic Amazon warehouse jobs. And it's, there's kind of a bunch of different buckets they fall into, but generally it involves moving boxes, moving packages, taking items, putting them into boxes, packaging those up, loading them onto trucks, kind of classic warehousing jobs. And the company has broken them down into these very specific roles. You know, there's picking and packing. There's a job called inducting, which is kind of putting the inventory into the system, so to speak. And a lot of it involves just moving

items and boxes and packages. And bit by bit, certain types of roles will be either augmented with technology or replace. So they now have robotic arms that can move individual items from one place to another. And that's very challenging. I mean, you think of all the items you buy on Amazon. They are like so random. You could have a battery charger. You could have a stapler.

You could have a t-shirt in a flexible package. You could have a large box of curd cups for your coffee. So there's a whole big variety of things that they have to manipulate with robotics. And so it's actually very challenging technical. problem. The flip side is it will create more jobs for robotic technicians. These are people that maintain and fix the robots. Those jobs pay more money. They have a potential for a career path in the way that the traditional hourly work doesn't because there's so many regular employees to each manager that the ratios just don't allow for much advancement. So these robotics jobs

are good, there just won't be as many of them as. Yeah, exactly. Now, you actually got to, I suppose, perhaps look at the future a bit when you visited Amazon's most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana. You write about how this is a template for future robotic fulfillment centers. Just how automated was it? What did it look like in there? Yeah, I was honestly kind of blown away. I've been to, I think this is the third generation of warehouse that I've been to. And there were parts of it that reminded me of older, older versions of the warehouses that I've seen where there's a lot of people, there's kind of that buzz of people, you know, they're still at their own workstation doing their thing, but there's kind of a vibrancy and literally even just kind of light there. And then

there are large parts of it that are actually quite literally dark. I mean, you don't need to light a big field of robotic storage or where there is just large parts of the work being done by robots. So it's a mix primarily of robotic arms that can either consolidate items into packages, they can move packages on their own. There's various forms of sort of moving robots that move either towers of inventory or individual packages. And then there's other things that are automated. Like the one I saw had three different types of ways that you could package, put, you know, build a box around a package or put an items into an envelope that were faster. than the traditional way of a person literally building a package out of a cardboard box.

But mostly I was amazed at how all the systems were orchestrated together. So you have these points right now that do have a very high human touch, like initially putting items into the storage, breaking down the kind of deliveries into the building, taking the items out and putting them into the kind of storage system. But then the items will go in these bins and they go through conveyor belts. they get consolidated by robotic arms to other conveyor abouts. A person might put it in another bin, but then it moves again through these various robotic processes. The items move throughout the building in this very orchestrated systematic way.

And that was part of what the breakthrough was, was rethinking overall, how should we move items through our buildings? What steps can we cut out if we change or make easier to make robotic if we change the overall structure of the building? So it's most like the orchestration that I found really remarkable. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarborough.cairot.com. Norval Morso is one of the most famous indigenous artists ever. Looking at his paintings, it's easy to see why. Colors are intense. Color is medicine. But look a little closer, and you'll see something else. Fakes.

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What is that about? Yeah, I think the company is very aware that this is a really sensitive topic. And a facility like the one I went to in Shreport, that's a brand new building that has 2,000 jobs. And so it's still net new jobs in that location. But there are also buildings that are going to be retrofit, where when they're done and they get more robotics will need fewer people than they did initially. And there's one that's going through the renovation right now in Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta.

And so if you have a building that potentially needs a thousand fewer workers at the end, that's more sensitive because you're kind of shrinking something versus just building something smaller to start with. And so there are teams that are kind of working on how do they navigate this next era? What language do they use? Do they avoid words like artificial intelligence or robots? They've talked about using the word co-bot, which implies a co-bot. It's a collaborative robot. It's a robot that collaborates with people. Still a robot. Definitely still a robot. Exactly. And you know, it's funny, a lot of these, you know, there's not that much collaboration in these robotic arms. A person might come by and fix it. If it's broken, they might move an item if it gets placed in the wrong location or drops. I saw that happen. It's kind of dangling item that fell down. But there are some places where they use automation just to make the job faster. There's an area I saw called decanting, where they take the items out of boxes and put them in the inventory. And it's been hard to automate that. So they now, instead of the worker scanning each individual item and the bin that they go into, they have computer vision that automatically detects what they've grabbed and what then they put it into. So it just moves the whole process along faster. That might be the closest you get to a co-bot.

It's not just about co-bots or avoiding some of these terms. The documents that you saw show that the company has considered building an image as a good corporate citizen. to combat some of the concern about how this might be received in communities, even talking about being more involved in certain community events. Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, the company historically, and when it was smaller, never did any meaningful community engagement. But as it's gotten bigger, this has become a very important source of community relations is the fact that many places, they are a major employer. And so they do things like Choice for Tots and local parades and they're involved with the Chamber of Commerce.

And so the documents I've seen have been discussing how do they lean into that more and try to bolster their image as a good local employer, as a good corporate citizen. They've debated other ways to kind of create local pride around, to control the narrative essentially and to create pride around having an advanced technologically advanced facility locally. So they're trying to trying to get ahead of this issue, which, again, is just quite sensitive of our robots replacing jobs. No one, as a worker, that's a very scary thought, essentially. And if you're looking in your community where Amazon gets, you know, many places, tax incentives and other things to encourage economic development, that's all because people want jobs. You talked earlier about the

conversation that you had with Amazon officials. They also, Amazon also said, it's not insisting that executives avoid certain terms. Yes, exactly. They say there's no mandate against that, that they do. The community events are not related, that they do these already. And it is true, they do do these already. So it's sort of this very careful language around trying to navigate the sensitivity. Right after my story ran Amazon had a major robotics kind of show and tell showcase.

and one of the people on stage said something to the effect of, you know, the headline isn't about robots. The headline is about the future we're building together. So they're clearly trying to navigate and talk around this issue without addressing it kind of head-on. What about the argument that they made to you that they have a long history of using the savings from automation to create jobs in another area? Is that fair? That is true. I mean, there's a reason that they've become such a large employer. Because they have made efficiencies, they first introduced robotics in roughly 2012 when they acquired Kiva. And the faster that Amazon has been able to deliver products, the more products they sell and the more people they historically have hired.

And what I found so interesting about that is I was looking at documents that are the big goals for the automation and robotics team. And it's clear from those that the ambition is squarely focused. on reducing headcount. I mean, there are other things. It's true that they track that these are more, you know, safer, safer solutions and at least the same speed as people, if not faster. But overall, the cost cutting comes from reducing headcount. I can't look into the crystal ball and say what else they may have.

I mean, they have been making other investments like building more delivery depots in more remote areas. Each one of those is not as large. You know, it's hard. You know, a lot of those to add up to the number of jobs that you would get in these large buildings. So it's hard to know precisely. They did not point to any specific investment going forward that they think could kind of make up for this. And broadly, if you look at the company, they have been managing their headcount, even as the business has grown and are clearly working, even just with the corporate layoffs just now, clearly working to do more with less. There have been a few successful unionization pushes that Amazon, the Staten Island facility in New York unionized, but it still doesn't have a contract. In Delta BC, Amazon workers won union certification with Uniform. Last year in Quebec, about 230 workers at an Amazon warehouse in LaValle successfully unionized. Amazon closed its Quebec warehouse operations shortly after that, leading to the loss of almost 2,000 jobs, although Amazon said it wasn't related to unionization.

And to what extent will unions play a role in this shift to automation at Amazon? Yeah, I did not see indications in the documents that this was to avoid unionization, but there was an awareness that this could feed into a desire to unionize because it gets at the fears of job and security, which has been one of the organizing efforts that the unions have had. So I think it's more of a, could this be a driver of greater organizing versus that being kind of a reason to automate more? If Amazon automates the scale that it has the ambition to based on the documents you saw, what do you think this means for other companies? I mean, as you said at the beginning, they are a huge private employer in the United States and around the world. Yes, it's, you know, I spoke to many economists in this reporting and they said that Amazon is sort of the cutting edge of this.

and that it will put pressure on competitors to follow suit. The warehousing space and fulfillment industry has become a growing part of the label market for a while now as retail work has slowly kind of shrunk as a share of the labor market. This warehousing and industrial space has a lot of room for more automation. You have package moving companies like UPS or DHS. You have other retailers, large retailers like Walmart and its competitors. So all these companies are working on automation. This just puts more pressure on them to follow suit.

And broadly, Amazon competes for a labor pool with other hourly work. So it could be anywhere from working in a grocery store to working at a fast food restaurant or a small local manufacturer. I've talked to people who said when a warehouse, an Amazon warehouse, opened up, it put pressure upwards on other employers. So there's a chance this could kind of ripple to other industries beyond the core retail and kind of warehousing and fulfillment world that is kind of central to this type of work. You've been covering Amazon for years now. When you think about how this potential shift could play out in communities, who is it that you think about most? Yeah, Amazon's workforce or its relationship to its

employees is very complicated. It's work that has had a lot of complaints over the years for being physically demanding or at least very repetitive in a way that can cause injuries or that can be mind-numbing. It has a history of having extremely high turnover. So there's not, you know, expertise or longevity isn't seen as being valued. And that's sort of by design. So in one sense, it's not the kind of ideal employer that you might hold up. But it has also done a lot for people looking for jobs who don't necessarily care about some of those factors or are happy to have this kind of work. So it does pay more than a minimum wage. You don't need to speak flu in English to get the job.

I've talked to immigrants who have said, where else can I make this much a year after landing in the country and not having flu in English? Its workforce has more of a more people of color than the traditional, the U.S. economy overall, the U.S. labor force overall. So you have the potential to impact kind of people of color, potentially new immigrants, things like that, more than the white working class. It's not just robotics that are changing the way we work. People hear so much about artificial intelligence. And so I wonder, in closing, when you look at the documents that you saw, when you think about the shift that is coming. I mean, how much of this is about Amazon versus something that is to some extent inevitable because of the time that we are in? Yes. I mean, I don't, in some sense,

some of this isn't surprising. Like, they have talked for a long time about automation, creating greater efficiencies. I think with the breakthroughs in AI, I think this is expected to only accelerate and to expand into different forms of work by a huge range of employers. I think what is challenging is that it's the labor part of it, the workforce part of it, is kind of hidden or not talking about explicitly. And what I found so striking is kind of the frankness in the internal conversation around it about how do we manage this change in terms of our image. How do we manage it in terms of actually the workforce, like not doing layoffs or

making sure we have enough technicians trained up. So there's a very practical conversation to be had about it. It's just, it's one that is hard to have out in the open. It is fascinating stuff. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about it, Karen. Thanks for having me. Karen Wise is the technology correspondent for the New York Times based in Seattle. We contacted Amazon, and they sent us a statement regarding the New York Times story that said, quote, Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that's the case here. The statement went on to say that, quote, there's no company directive to avoid terms like automation and AI when talking about robotics.

And that, quote, we strive to be good neighbors in every community in which we operate. This includes supporting organizations and community events. Tying a retrofit project to local community efforts such as the Times has stated is inaccurate. it. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.