ICYMI: Amazon's Robotic Ranks Reach One Million
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This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

Amazon is marking a milestone today, now using over a million robots in its warehouses. The U.S. e-commerce company and so much more, to be fair, now uses over a million robots in its warehouses, which is about the same level as its employees, at least according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported out this news. Let's get more on this

and what is really increasingly becoming a robotic world, it feels like. We head to Tokyo where it is the middle of the night. We are grateful that he stayed up or woke up for us. Welcome back to Bloomberg Business Week Daily. Ty Brady, Chief Technologist at Amazon Robotics. Ty, thank you. Did you nap?

Did you stay up? It's a short nap, but it's a really exciting day for sure. And thank you for having me on. Robots don't need to sleep. It's early morning here in Tokyo. Yeah, that's true. Robots don't need to sleep, but they do need to be taken care of. Hey, one millionth robot and counting over that mark. What was the robot that marked the milestone and how significant is for you? Give us some kind of size and scope of robots at Amazon. Remind us. It's an incredible achievement. I'm so proud of our team to be able to...

deploy more than 1 million robots to our global fleet. Our 1 millionth robot here in Tokyo, we actually deliver it to a fulfillment center in Chiba here in Japan, a great region for us for sure. And the way that we see it is it's really a force multiplier for both safety for our employees and also for the efficiencies, getting those goods right to our customers' door on time at a low cost, just in time for Prime Day.

So when we talk about robots, I don't think of the Roomba. I think of C3PO. And that doesn't seem to be where we are quite yet. Certainly not in America. Right. We don't have a bunch of humanoid androids running around. How far away is that, Ty? Yeah.

Matt, you're speaking my love language because when I think of robots, I actually think of R2-D2, not C-3PO, because I do want to remind you who was in the back of the X-Wing fighter when Luke Skywalker had to go into the Death Star. That was R2-D2. And why I love R2-D2, and actually R2-D2 was the inspiration for my entire career, it's because R2-D2 helps a Jedi be more Jedi. And that's...

kind of the way that we view our robotics inside of Amazon, we see our robotics as an extension, an amplification of what a person can do.

Just like any great robot, it should be a tool centered around a person, right? So we put people at the center of the robotics universe. That's what we've done with a million robots that we've deployed out there, whether it's in mobility or manipulation. We are giving our frontline employees the right tool set in order to do their jobs more efficiently, and we also created more safety for them.

Ty, where's it all going? And I ask that if we're giving, you know, increasingly you've got these robots, you've got AI and all of this is assisting workers. Like, where is it all headed?

Yeah, it's well, I really do believe that we're pioneering the field of collaborative robotics. So as we continue to gain efficiencies, as we continue to create safety for our employees, we become more productive. That has clearly worked inside of Amazon and frankly, for e-commerce, where we see that if you can build your robots in the right way, that amplifies human potential. And as a system that works with people, it's not

People versus machines, but it's machines and people working together in order to do the job. We have really revolutionized that field. So what we have seen historically is the more robots that we have added, and this is now over 10 years plus since Amazon really got serious about robotics, we've created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. And we've also even created new job types.

So where I see it going is that the onus is on us roboticists to build our machines in a way that is intuitive and natural for people to use, to build them with specific intent in the functions in order to help people do their jobs better.

And my goal is to eliminate the menial, the mundane and the repetitive. I aim to eliminate every single one of those tasks and allow people to think at a higher level and use the tool set in order to get the job done. What kind of robots are helping you deal with like Prime Day, for instance? It's coming up. I think July 8th is when it kicks off.

massive shopping day for people around the world, but also for people in Amazon warehouses. I mean, do they have like an exoskeleton like like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow? Or is it actually, you know, a humanoid that's running around picking up orders and putting them in boxes to ship out?

Yeah, we think of function first before form, right? So when you say humanoid, that's really the form base. But the functions that we really index on in robotics is the ability to move items from one side of the warehouse to another or manipulate items or store or sort or identify and pack those items. That's really what we do. So if you were to walk into one of our fulfillment centers, you would see these little drive units, moving goods at will,

thousands and thousands of these drive units moving our pods to a person in order to pick out those items. You would see robotic arms picking up heavy packages. This is the repetitive jobs that I speak of before. Picking up heavy packages and moving those into sortation systems. You would see sortation drives moving

to the right and correct spot in order to bring it to the truck. You would see a cute little robot that we call Proteus, and that's safety certified around people that can move these large containers of goods to the right truck at the right time. So it's really the symphony of people and machines working together, which is really incredible to see. And it's a very practical, in a very practical manner. And that's something that I'm very proud of because this

Application is really what's driving the fundamentals of robotics. It allows us to be adaptive and more modular, creating a safer environment for our employees and also, frankly, gaining a lot of efficiencies. Hey, Ty, it does look like we're just showing some pictures out there for those who are watching us right now. And it does look like robots are increasingly becoming more, you know, quote unquote, human-like in terms of standing up and having kind of appendages. That's the form he doesn't want to talk about.

I know, I know you don't. But I want to go to something, Times of London out, Andy Jassy, of course, your chief executive, sending a memo to staff in June saying he expected its corporate workforce would shrink as it rolls out AI. And this was the quote, we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs in the next few years. We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. That's AI. But I do think about AI and robotics today.

really increasingly merging. Replacing workers, how close are you guys to using more robots than humans in your warehouses?

Yeah, it's a great quote, first of all. And I do want to point out the difference between there's AI systems and there's physical AI systems, right? So you can think of an AI system as the digital chess that's in your computer and you can play chess there. But physical AI is that you would want a system with a real chessboard in front of you where you're actually picking up the pieces and moving those pieces, right? So this physical...

And what we have seen is when we build the right tool set for our employees, what we do is we really increase productivity for our employees. And what that does is that allows us to invest more in two key areas. We invest in better collaborative robotics, right, a better tool set for our employees to use. And we all also invest in our people.

We have upskilled more than 700,000 of our employees. It's really important to be mindful of upskilling. It's important to realize that jobs will change over time. There's no doubt about that. And our aim is to give our employees, in particular our frontline employees, the best tool set possible for them to do their jobs. So,

I love that upskilling figure. And it sounds like you guys are prioritizing, certainly making sure your employees, they can kind of move up or move on to where you guys have demand and where you need workers. But I do want to go back to, is there a point where you do have more robots and humans in your warehouses? And are you close? Yeah, it's just be careful about the correlation, because imagine you're let's just say that you're a carpenter, right? I

What I aim to do is give that carpenter the best tool set possible. I don't really count the number of tools that they would have, but instead I would actually index on the effectiveness of those tools. Are we allowing that carpenter to do their art and create or build the house in a shorter amount of time with even higher quality and create a safer environment? So, I mean, we could index on the numbers. We're proud of the numbers that we have for sure because it represents the

Some really pioneering work by the many women and men, scientists and engineers that have designed them. But remember, we also manufacture these. So we have manufacturing jobs. Remember, we support these in the field. We deploy these live in the field. And then, of course, we have our frontline operators that we're very, very thankful for. So it's a full ecosystem that when you it's really a force multiplier. When you do robotics right, when you do robotics that extends technology,

a person's capability to do their job amplifies the human potential, then you really have changed the game. And that's why today's one million, it's a one million force multiplier for our employees, for the benefit of our employees, and also for the benefits of our customers. Because we know that they love to have the world's largest selection of goods. Robotics helps with that. We can actually, as compared to our manual buildings, we can store more than 40% more goods in the same footprint.

We know that it fuels a lower cost that we can pass along to our customer because of the efficiency gains inside of our entire fulfillment chain. And we know it fuels the fast delivery times that we know our customers love because we have the ability to pull any order really quickly and bring the right good right to the customer's door. So robotics is helping spin that flywheel. Carol has never gotten over Eric Brynjolfsson's book,

against the machine. And so that's what she's asking about. You went to MIT, right? And so, you know, you know, you know, Grinjo here.

Here's the thing. I think it's great if robotics, especially some of those tedious jobs, repetitive jobs, physical jobs. And then if you're upskilling to, you know, people who are working now on creating the robots, like I think it's a pretty cool thing. I think, you know, it's supposed to be dystopian, but I love the idea in WALL-E that we will eventually just float around in deck chairs on a cruise ship drinking Icy's while the robots do our work for us and get paid dividends. What do you think about that?

That kind of future. And I especially wonder about cryptocurrencies being used because machines will have to work with machines and transact. And this was the idea that we were kind of sold on at the birth of Bitcoin. But is there any is there anything that's not science fiction to that idea?

Well, I could tell you what we're doing is definitely not science fiction. It's actually very practical and applied, and it's giving a great success to

to our employees and it's also benefiting our customers very directly. So I love that Carol, I love that the idea. I'm gonna go jump back to Star Wars for a minute if you guys wanna geek out for me for a second. If you remember, we have a young Luke Skywalker, he didn't even know he had the Jedi force and when he met R2-D2 and C-3PO, he was actually going to get farming equipment.

R2-D2 and C-3PO were meant to be farming aids to help him, even in our science fiction. Kidnapped by the sand people, remember? Yeah. Well, next thing you know, he meets the two of them and he's a Jedi. That's not too bad. Now, I have my own feelings about C-3PO. I mean, C-3PO needs to step up their game a little bit. Let's just say that. Yeah.

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