AI, the hangover from COVID-era overhiring, work-from-home, return-to-office mandates, and robotics are restructuring what labor does and how we do it. Jobs that felt stable a few years ago are rapidly changing or vanishing completely.

Amazon has been at the center of nearly every major labor market shift of the last three decades, even as it has gone from scrappy startup to the second-largest private employer in the world.

Last week, I visited Amazon’s fulfillment center known as LGA9 in Edison, New Jersey.

I was not allowed to take photos inside the facility, which is a shame, because it is impressive. Barcodes and QR codes are everywhere. They are on individual items, on the boxes those items are packed into, and even on the floor, guiding robots along prescribed paths as they move containers around the warehouse.

We are heading into the peak holiday season in the United States, so the place was buzzing. Hundreds of employees were working on the warehouse floor. Conveyor belts hummed overhead while robots glided across the floor, bringing carts full of knickknacks and doodads to human workers.

The system is incredibly efficient. Here is what work looks like at one station - the “picker” role.

A robot brings a cart to the worker. On a screen, the worker sees an image of the item, along with a cue showing which compartment of the cart it sits in. A light highlights that compartment. The worker reaches in, grabs the item, and another green light shows which tote to place it in. Then they push the button above the tote, and it is whisked away on a conveyor belt to the next step in the process.

It all takes seconds.

The job already feels robotic, even though a human is doing it. What goes into the box and where it goes next are determined by an algorithm. The worker just follows the screen’s directions and has to be accurate and fast with their hands.

If you were looking for an example of a job that is ripe for automation, this is it. The workflow is already broken down into small, tightly scripted steps. The system already “knows” what needs to happen. Replacing the person at the cart with a robotic arm feels less like science fiction and more like a straightforward engineering problem.

LGA9 is not Amazon’s most cutting-edge warehouse, having been in operation since 2017. The newest buildings, like Amazon’s Shreveport, Louisiana facility, are the true templates for the future, and even more of the work is being done by robots.

The picker-like jobs are among those that face extinction in the newer facilities. If a job can be broken into a series of predictable actions prompted by a screen and a blinking light, it is exactly the kind of work that machines are getting better at every year.

There are areas of job growth here too. Things break. Robots jam. Sensors fail. The machines cannot fix themselves. They need people with the training to diagnose what went wrong, improvise solutions, and keep the system running. Those “thinking jobs” are fewer in number, but they are going to continue to grow in importance.

There are far more automateable jobs than there are “safe” jobs in the fulfillment center. The New York Times reports that Amazon plans to have around 40 facilities built on the new template by the end of 2027, and has already begun overhauling some existing locations to match that model. Amazon’s automation team expects that these changes will allow the company to avoid hiring about 160,000 people in the United States by 2027.

Recently, there have been reports that Amazon is considering cutting ties with the U.S. Postal Service and building out its own shipping network. It is easy to imagine what that might look like: a logistics system that applies Amazon’s playbook to the last mile from an Amazon warehouse to your front door, more efficient and with less human jobs throughout.

Amazon is a leader in automation, but similar stories are playing out in factories and warehouses around the world. White-collar work, once safe from all of this, is now facing similar pressures from AI.

If a job is so repeatable that it can be automated, it will be.

For talent acquisition leaders, the real question is: how many of the roles that we hire for are being reshaped by these dynamics, including the jobs on our own recruiting teams?

— David

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