Amazon has been on a multibillion-dollar and decade-plus-long crusade to be a leader in robotics and drive workplace efficiency. The company has two robotics facilities in the Greater Boston Area that have become Amazon Robotics. Will Amazon’s big investment in robotics pay off and what does this mean for the future of its workers?

Fortune explores how Amazon engineers are looking to robotics to revolutionize its shipping business.

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Amazon Robotics: Inside the Testing Lab Where Engineers Design the Latest Machine Learning | Fortune

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Fortune explores how Amazon engineers are looking to robotics to revolutionize its shipping business.

Amazon Robotics: Inside the Testing Lab where Engineers Design the Latest Machine Learning | Fortune

Will Amazon’s big investment in robotics pay off and what does this mean for the future of its workers?

This robot snuck up beside me. Uh oh, this is one of the primary sites where Amazon designs, tests, and builds its fleet of more than 750,000 robots. We wanted to have this visual of the engineers being able to look out the windows and say, I can see my product. I built it. I designed it here. I can go downstairs. I'm on with the test engineers. It may sound sort of like R2-D2. The decade plus multi-billion dollar investment into robotics is key to Amazon's efficiency goals, especially as the delivery behemoth faces accusations about worker safety in its fulfillment centers. Before we start talking about productivity and efficiency, we start with safety as we think about the. The within the fulfillment centers to innovate and improve, we tend to look at the most challenging tasks lifting, manipulating, moving. So will Amazon's big robotics bet pay off as humans work side by side with robots? What will this mean for Amazon's workers and the future of its shipping business? We are about an hour outside of Boston at Amazon's robotics hub. It's a relatively new facility they bought a few years ago. We're here to look at Amazon's unique approach to robotics, which is to have the entire life cycle of the project and of the products under one roof, from development to testing to manufacturing. So Joe, we're about an hour outside of Boston. What's the history of this facility? We opened this facility about 3 years ago, and you can see on this road there's a number of Amazon facilities. Our mother's site was, was the original site, which is the Boss 12 up in North Reading, and we've grown quite a bit, and we want to open another development site and so we landed in West, Massachusetts. The talented area is rich from previous, you know, generations of technology that had been up and down the corridor here. We built this about 3 years ago, you know, when we opened it, we were a little worried, you know. Would they come and they and they have come, which is pretty exciting. Amazon has two robotics sites in the greater Boston area. The North Reading location was part of the acquisition of Kiva in 2012, which then became Amazon Robotics. What's unique about this space is how many roles it houses under one roof, from designers to scientists to testing engineers. Can I drive one? Yeah. It's the result of a decision to not outsource and maintain control of the supply chain. They seem to be communicating. Their own little language. This one's got a bin. This one I'm controlling. This one has a mind of its own. I don't really know what it's doing, but it's chirping a lot, so it seems to be happy. I pursue this strategy of vertical integration of building every aspect of the supply chain and manufacturing the robots. Well, one speed, right? The thing is having anten control, full vertical is we think gives us speed, and every time you start decoupling things, you're going to lose that speed. And then you're also going to lose the insights that the other processes have or the other functions have by having it all together, that feedback loop is super tight. The second thing is innovation, right? We get lots of great insight from those other teams. So the teams that are building the manufacturing teams have a large voice into the design cycle and they influence our design, impact our design. The folks that are deploying it also here have a large voice into the impact. This is where a lot of the software development is done for these products, and you can start with an idea on a whiteboard. 9 months later you can see it all of a sudden being in a prototype in the test lab. 18 months later you see your product rolling off the line. That is like super empowering when new candidates come in and see what's the Amazon special sauce and robotics. This is it. Amazon is #7 on this year's most innovative companies list, and its robotics program is helping lead the charge on innovation. Multiple robots are developed or tested here in Westboro, fulfilling different roles from lifting to sorting to getting out of the. Way of humans. We're going to see your favorite robot, Proteus. Yeah, when we started that, there was a team of 6, and often where innovation gets stifled is when you overstaff a program too early. And sometimes the best path to success is to keep it super small with highly talented people who can move at a pace that a larger team will slow us down. Is the main thing that you're working on these arms and checking out the Proteus. So Proteus is my specialty. These are very complicated systems. And are you working on the engineering side as well, or is it? More on the testing once it's actually out here in production. So my particular job is with testing. We'd rather find problems here, get them fixed, and then push the fixed version with the improvements and updates out production in order to make the system better. What's it like working alongside robots? Oh, it's great. I really enjoy this. I've been doing this for quite a while, so I've really, really taken a liking to the robots, both the arms, the drive units, the combination of the two of them working together. Yeah, it's really fun. Robotics are gonna fundamentally change what their jobs are, right? What tasks they're doing every day. So how do you think about that? And that's super exciting too. It's creating new opportunities. I think we've all seen there's always this tension between how does impact people, and I think we've always seen that automation and technology breakthroughs create opportunities and create new jobs, and I think it's hard to argue that Amazon has not been a great job creator in almost every domain, you know, you can. but automation is still inevitably going to come with concerns over worker replacement, and I know Amazon has invested a lot more than a billion dollars in this process of upskilling or teaching new skills to workers. Do you think upskilling is the solution to fears of replacement? There are two things. We continue to grow at a very high rate and so the number of facilities, the number of jobs we're creating is been. to see. And then the second part is, yeah, the upskilling is creating new exciting jobs and opportunities for potentially a group of people that wouldn't have that opportunity. And so I think in both dimensions we're going to see growth. And it's not just upskilling that's front of mind. A Senate committee report released in December reported conditions at Amazon warehouses were unsafe and prioritized speed over safety. How much does safety play a role in your thinking about how robotics are going to Into Amazon's process, it's front and center. Before we start talking about productivity and efficiency, we start with safety. As we think about the opportunity within the fulfillment centers to innovate and improve, we tend to look at the most challenging tasks lifting, manipulating, moving things. We're excited about what we've done, and we have a new facility with some of our newer generation technology that is 10x the automation of our previous generation. Amazon is known for its relentless pursuit of efficiency and productivity. Of course they're always trying to get packages to customers faster and faster. Robotics is really key to making that happen. At the same time, safety is a huge concern for Amazon. Joe talked about how a lot of worker functions, and especially the worker functions like repetitive movements that often lead to injuries, are being replaced by robots. And I think Amazon acknowledges this, and they put a lot of investment into upskilling or this process of basically teaching workers new skills and being able to give them new jobs. I mean, whether that's successful, I think remains to be seen, and you'll still have fears of what replacement looks like for workers, but you can see that robotics really will be the future in trying to replace a lot of the different areas that we do associate with workplace injuries and risk. I asked Joe whether he did see a future in which the warehouses or the fulfillment centers would be fully automated, and I think Amazon hasn't even fully thought that through, but I think even for a company as innovative as Amazon, it's still unclear what this might look like 10 years down the road. The great thing about Amazon, it still operates in many ways like a startup has a startup mentality of speed. You're able to innovate at a speed and you don't get bogged down with bureaucracy over sometimes a big company. I mean, there have been challenging times when I was sure this thing was going to work in some way and it didn't, and the disappointment your idea just didn't pan out. But to see the impact when you go globally, our products have made to our associates that flywheel of driving customer selection, lower prices and speed, I get to see it real time and so that's been pretty it's like a once in a lifetime opportunity.