Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers will soon have as many robots as human employees reading destination labels, packing orders and loading conveyor belts. Amazon serves 310 million customers worldwide, using various robot configurations to aid 1.56 million employees to process and deliver inventory and handle other businesses. Now the company has delivered its one millionth robot, to a facility in Japan. With artificial intelligence making a beeline toward white-collar work and warehouse robots poised to elbow aside manual laborers, global economics could shift on the practices of this company alone.

In the U.S. where it reports 1.1 million employees (second only to Walmart) and about 60 percent of sales, Amazon’s approach to staffing and workflow have significant impact and hint at broader trends.

“Amazon’s one millionth robot represents more than just a number. The company has improved its fleet of robots in recent years, adding new capabilities and models,” writes TechCrunch. For example, a new two-armed model called Vulcan moves inventory and has a more sophisticated grasp of the product it is handling — facilitated through camera-assisted computer vision as well as “a sense of ‘touch’ that allows it to feel the items it is grabbing.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that robotics are assisting 75 percent of global deliveries in an article featuring adjacent graphs showing increasing sales and a declining human workforce.

The company has just launched a new foundation AI model called DeepFleet to “coordinate the movement of robots” across the fulfillment network, improving efficiency by 10 percent and enabling quicker and cheaper deliveries, according to an Amazon news release.

“The company used Amazon SageMaker — the AWS cloud studio that helps build and deploy AI models — to create DeepFleet,” and “trained the model on its own warehouse and inventory data,” according to CNBC, which says Amazon’s robot deployment began in  2012 and has since “grown tremendously” with current models ranging from those “able to lift up to 1,250 pounds of inventory to fully autonomous robots that navigate factories with carts of customer orders.”

While a 2025 Pew Research study said experts and the public found factory workers among those whose jobs are at risk due to AI, Amazon says it “has trained more than 700,000 workers across the world for higher-paying jobs that can include working with robotics,” per WSJ.

Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy is quoted by Business Insider as saying that while some jobs are being displaced, new opportunities are arising in AI and robotics.