Amazon unveils latest warehouse robot as tech giants do AI layoffs

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 AI-driven efficiencies.

The tech giant’s next-generation Proteus is an autonomous mobile robot, which is 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’s currently used in 25 fulfillment centers in the U.S., with the latest version of the robot 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’s part of a broader push to expand the technology in Europe, with Amazon also committing to investing 10 billion euros ($11.6 billion) to modernize fulfillment operations in the region over the next few years.

Other robotics advancements include its first robot with a sense of touch, Vulcan, and a robotic tote handling system called STARK.

The announcement comes as Amazon continues to push ahead with AI-driven layoffs, including cutting 14,000 corporate workers in October as it looks to invest further in the technology. It said it’s laying off a further 16,000 workers in January to reduce layers and bureaucracy.

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 tech giants, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM, were behind thousands of AI layoffs in 2025, with the technology responsible for over 50,000 layoffs in the U.S. during the year. More recently, Block, Oracle, and Meta were among the firms carrying out job cuts.

“Since we’ve invested in robotics, we’ve created hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics told CNBC on Thursday.

Investments in people, upskilling, and smart machines create jobs, Brady said, adding that Amazon is creating jobs at a scale not seen in the U.S. in the past 10 years.

Amazon’s Vice President, Country Manager for the U.K. and Ireland, John Boumphrey, told CNBC that its robotics investment actually requires it to hire more workers inside fulfillment centers, with the company 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 told CNBC.

However, not everyone is convinced that robotics won’t lead to a drop-off in the workforce.

AI robots have already been forecasted to exceed the working population over the next few decades, with one 2024 Citi report showing 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’s “Squawk Box Europe” 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 the economic terms and business terms that celebrates profitability,” Garlick said at the time. “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 number of young people between the ages of 16 and 24, who are not in education, employment or training in the U.K., reached over one million by the end of May, according to data from the country’s Office for National Statistics last week.

Young people face major challenges in the job market, from AI replacing entry-level positions to increased competition for jobs. 

Boumphrey said it’s 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 company has created over 6,000 apprenticeships in the U.K. to address this skills gap and gives staff £3000 a year to train on nationally recognized courses.