Amazon has unveiled its latest warehouse robot that can take commands in conversational language, underscoring how AI-powered automation is advancing as companies continue to slash their corporate workforce in the name of efficiency.
The tech giant’s next-generation Proteus is an autonomous mobile robot designed to understand natural language commands from workers and transport items in warehouses. It was launched at the company’s “Delivering the Future” event in London on Thursday.
The original Proteus was first deployed in Amazon fulfillment centers in 2022 to assist workers, including transporting heavy carts weighing up to 400 kilograms. It is currently used in 25 fulfillment centers in the United States. The latest version of the robot is set to be rolled out in Europe in the first half of 2027.
Workers will be able to direct the new Proteus in plain language, without technical commands or a programming interface. It is part of a broader push to expand the technology in Europe, with Amazon committing to investing 10 billion euros ($11.6 billion) to modernize fulfillment operations in the region over the next few years.
The Layoff Reality
The announcement comes as Amazon continues to push ahead with AI-driven layoffs. The company cut 14,000 corporate workers in October and is laying off a further 16,000 workers in January to reduce layers and bureaucracy. That brings the total to 30,000 job cuts.
CEO Andy Jassy told staff last year that AI will result in a shrinking of Amazon’s workforce over the coming years.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in a memo to employees. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
Several other tech giants, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM, were behind thousands of AI layoffs in 2025. The technology was responsible for over 50,000 layoffs in the US during the year. More recently, Block, Oracle, and Meta have also carried out job cuts.
The Other Side of the Argument
Despite the layoffs, Amazon executives argue that robotics actually creates jobs.
“Since we’ve invested in robotics, we’ve created hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told CNBC.
John Boumphrey, Amazon’s Vice President and Country Manager for the UK and Ireland, told CNBC that the company’s robotics investment actually requires it to hire more workers inside fulfillment centers. He said Amazon is struggling to hire people with the right skills.
“I would place a large bet that we’re going to need an awful lot of people in our warehouse in the future… we employ more people in the same space, so actually, our experience of robots is that it’s driven up employment rather than the reverse,” Boumphrey said.
The company has created over 6,000 apprenticeships in the UK to address the skills gap and gives employees £3,000 a year to train on nationally recognized courses.
The Skeptics
Not everyone is convinced that robotics won’t lead to a drop-off in the workforce. AI robots have already been forecast to exceed the working population over the next few decades. One 2024 Citi report showed that they will increase to 1.3 billion by 2035 and over four billion by 2050.
Rob Garlick, Citi Global Insights’ former head of innovation, technology, and future of work, told CNBC in February that leaders will move to replace workers as humanoid robots already have a quicker payback period than humans.
“We have a leadership system in economic terms and business terms that celebrates profitability,” Garlick said. “When you marry profitability up with the technology progress, we have the biggest trade in history coming, which is basically that artificial intelligence will be able to do more and more, better and better, cheaper and cheaper, and that will be able to substitute for people.”
The Youth Unemployment Crisis
The number of young people between 16 and 24 who are not in education, employment, or training in the UK reached over one million by the end of May, according to data from the country’s Office for National Statistics. Young people face major challenges in the job market, from AI replacing entry-level positions to increased competition for jobs.
Boumphrey called it a “national crisis,” with a key challenge being that young people are unprepared for the world of work.
“It’s the combination of growing up in Covid and an era of smartphones and social media… we’ve brought up a generation of young people whose idea of engaging with the community is to sit in a darkened room, be on their phone, and scroll; that’s not their fault.”
Despite AI layoffs and youth unemployment concerns, Boumphrey said Amazon “cannot find enough people to do the skilled jobs that we need,” from robotic technicians to mechatronic engineers.
The Bottom Line
Amazon unveiled its next-generation Proteus warehouse robot that responds to natural language commands. The company has laid off 30,000 corporate workers as it invests further in AI. Amazon executives argue that robotics creates jobs, pointing to hundreds of thousands of new positions and a skills gap that leaves positions unfilled. Critics warn that AI will eventually substitute for human workers at scale. The tension between automation and employment is not resolved. But Amazon is placing its bet.
