Amazon has been ramping up the use of robots as demand for cost-cutting measures increases and sales growth slows. Some sort of robotic device has already handled nearly three-quarters of the parcels that the e-commerce giant has delivered. The Sparrow, the company’s most recent robot, is a device that can freely roam alongside humans on the warehouse floor and can pick up items before they are placed in a box, which authorities have dubbed a significant breakthrough. It will start making its first drone deliveries in the US later this year. But Tye Brady, the chief technology officer at Amazon Robotics, explains that this is expected to reach 100%, or almost, in the next five years. “Jobs will change for sure, but the need for humans will always be there,” Mr. Brady said.

Dwight Klappich, research vice president for Gartner’s logistics team, claims that companies all over the supply chain are making significant investments in robotics due to the labor crisis. Amazon will have more mobile drive robots scooting around the warehouse floors now than there will be in 2019. Additionally, it has deployed about 1,000 of a prior model of its robot arm at places in the US and Europe to sort goods. Amazon claims that by the end of the decade, it will be using drones to deliver 500 million packages annually. However, that will still represent a very small portion of the 5 billion shipments the business claims it presently processes annually. Robotics has also not escaped the company’s cost-cutting focus as concerns about an impending economic recession have grown and the company’s sales have slowed.