Amazon’s goal to kill mundane jobs
Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer of Robotics, Tye Brady, shared his vision for reinventing the workplace inside warehouses and fulfillment centers for the online retailer.
Amazon is doubling down on artificial intelligence and robotics to remake work inside its warehouses and fulfillment centers, even as it cuts thousands of corporate roles and faces growing fears about machines replacing human workers.
Amazon announced 14,000 corporate job cuts as part of a broad internal restructuring, in its latest earnings report. A recent New York Times report also suggested Amazon plans to replace as many as 500,000 jobs with robots over time.
"Jobs will change. We've seen jobs change, tasks change," Amazon's CTO of Robotics Tye Brady told Gxstocks’ Susan Li at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon.
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Brady was blunt about what that means for certain roles. "I'm not shy about the fact that I want to eliminate every menial, mundane and repetitive job out there. That's what we do inside of Amazon," he said.
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has attributed the corporate job cuts to over-hiring during the Covid pandemic that added extra layers of middle management, locations and lines of business. He’s argued the reductions are necessary to stay "nimble" as AI reshapes how the company operates. Amazon’s workforce has roughly tripled since 2018 to about 1.5 million last year, only slightly below its 2021 peak of 1.6 million employees, according to SEC filings.
Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon. speaks during the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco, California. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images)
At the same time, Amazon has pledged $2.5 billion over five years to retrain employees and communities to adapt to the changing demands of the workplace.
"We have a responsibility. I think any tech company has a responsibility to upskill your employees," Brady said. "Amazon is committed to those efforts because we realize that jobs will change." He added that "right now is the right time" to be spending on upskilling the workforce as generative AI spreads.
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A robot picks up a tote containing product during the first public tour of the newest Amazon Robotics fulfillment center on April 12, 2019 in the Lake Nona community of Orlando, Florida. The over 855,000 square foot facility opened on August 26, 2018 (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Amazon plans to spend more than $125 billion this year, with the majority going into its cloud and AI infrastructure. Brady, who has spent more than 40 years in technology, called generative AI "probably the most transformative technology that I've witnessed in my career."
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Amazon Robotics has recently rolled out innovations such as robotic arms that can pack boxes and its Vulcan robot with a sense of touch, part of a push to staff its fulfillment centers with many more robots alongside human workers. For now, Amazon manufactures its robots in Massachusetts, Brady said.
