Amazon Has Over 1.56 Million Workers and 1 Million Robots. A Historic Robot vs. Human Contest Dropped a Hint on What Might Come Next.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is starting to look like a real frontrunner in physical AI. Now, it’s no mystery that Amazon has been putting robots to work at its warehouse, behind the scenes, to help out humans with all those packages. But until you’ve seen the robots at work, it’s difficult to even begin to fathom what the future could hold, not just for Amazon, but perhaps for the rest of the retail world and beyond.

With reportedly more than 1 million robots deployed (that milestone was hit at the midpoint of last year), the number of human workers over at the e-commerce titan still outnumber them. But for how long? That remains a multi-trillion-dollar question. Either way, it’s hard not to believe that the number of bots could exceed the number of humans at some point in the near future.

Human workers exceed robots, for now

Of course, beyond physical robots, we also have to consider all those AI agents hard at work on white-collar tasks. Following the latest wave of layoffs, it was the corporate (or white collar) jobs that were on the chopping block. It was a historic moment as the firm cut around 30,000 jobs in two big layoff waves.

While the skeptics would argue that Amazon had simply overhired and is continuing to correct, it’s becoming really difficult to ignore the automation potential behind the latest wave of AI tools. With Amazon spending a whopping $200 billion in CapEx this year, you just had to think that there would have to be some form of major cost savings found elsewhere. In any case, it’s not just the offices where Amazon could find even more efficiencies, as the company continues investing considerable sums in warehouse automation and robotics.

A recent video, which has since gone viral, shows a startup, Figure AI, conducting the ultimate test: putting a human intern up against one of its humanoid robots in a live 10-hour package-sorting marathon. If you haven’t seen the video yet, the human won, but, boy, was it close. And there was a price to be paid, as Aime, the human, was visibly tired, blistered, and fatigued. It made for tough viewing, for more reasons than one, but the big takeaway, I think, is that robots are closing the gap.

And, in my view, the big question is how much better other robots, most notably ones deployed by Amazon itself, with its deep pockets and wealth of training data, could fare if a similar competition were to be conducted.

The robot vs. human video has shed a spotlight on physical AI and warehouse automation

Would an Amazon bot come out ahead of a human? I guess it depends on what job we’re talking about. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if the robot came out on top in a pure sorting head-to-head competition, especially against a human who wasn’t pushing their body to the absolute limit, as Aime was.

That said, the physical workflow over at Amazon will look vastly different, especially since there are more variables to consider and tasks to accomplish beyond sorting. Most notably, scanning and dealing with different shapes and sizes of packages that come out. All considered, in such a realistic head-to-head, the human would probably win by a wider margin. But that gap will probably narrow with like, and likely at a faster pace than many think.

At the end of the day, there’s a reason why humans are still working in the warehouse. The technology is on the right track, but it’s not yet at full autonomy. Of course, things could change quickly, given how fast AI is moving on the exponential curve.

The bottom line

Even if things are vastly more complicated for a robot in the actual warehouse, there’s perhaps no firm better to tackle warehouse automation than Amazon. If anything, the robot vs. human sorting video is just an appetizer of what to expect as the physical AI wave heads into high gear.