Amazon has become the world's largest operator of warehouse robots, with more than 1 million robots working around the clock in its fulfillment centers, according to Ars Technica. The company is also the second-largest corporate employer globally, with over 1.5 million human workers. Amazon executives say the robots take on the most physically demanding tasks, reducing fatigue and injury risk for people who work alongside them.
But researchers and labor advocates caution that the picture is more complicated. Collaborative robots work in close physical proximity to humans and can set the pace of work, a shift from earlier automation that removed dangerous tasks from workers entirely. The US warehouse sector already has injury and illness rates more than double the all-industry average, and high turnover remains a persistent problem.
Robots are still far from replacing humans entirely. Most of Amazon's fleet consists of wheeled mobile robots that move storage pods to workers, while newer systems like Proteus can roam freely around people. Amazon is also deploying robotic arms in the single-digit thousands and expects to more than double that number this year. To keep the growing fleet moving smoothly, the company uses AI foundation models called DeepFleet to predict and avoid robot traffic jams.
Despite the rapid expansion of automation, Amazon still depends heavily on human workers for tasks robots cannot yet handle. The company is building new robot production facilities in Texas and Indiana, signaling that the fleet will keep growing—and that the question of how humans and robots share the warehouse floor will remain central to Amazon's operations.