Amazon's Proteus robot now takes plain language orders as €10bn warehouse automation push begins

Amazon unveils latest warehouse robot as tech giants continue AI layoffs

"Our experience of robots is that it's actually driven up employment rather than the reverse," Amazon executive John Boumphrey told CNBC. 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 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. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot is fully autonomous - Engadget

Amazon has put more than a million robots into its warehouses but none so far have been able to "talk" with human employees. However, a new version of its Proteus robot can now be directed by workers using plain language thanks to an AI upgrade, Amazon announced. "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Amazon Robotics VP Scott Dresser. Proteus looks like a heavy-duty Roomba and is designed to move heavy carts and cover long distances within fulfillment centers. Before, commanding such robots required the use of custom software. Now, employees can assign tasks to the latest AI-powered models using plain language, much as they would with another employee. The extra intelligence also allows the system to work all around warehouses rather than just in the dock areas as before. That means they can be used to transport containers arriving on site, transfer them between workstations and assist employees. Amazon is piloting the new system in its labs, but plans to start using them in Europe in the first half of 2027. It also plans to expand the use of its Vulcan touch-sensitive robot and introduce another one for handling "totes" (smaller containers) with precision, called Stark. Amazon says that the new Proteus robots will help employees "focus on higher-skilled work like managing inventory flow and ensuring quality control." It added that such systems improve safety and reduce repetitive work. At the same time, Amazon said it hasn't replaced human jobs and announced plans to expand its European warehouse workforce by 25,000 in the coming years. "Since introducing robotics into its operations, Amazon has hired hundreds of thousands of employees globally," the company wrote. However, Amazon has also laid off nearly 30,000 workers over the past year or so across its retail, web services, Prime Video and other units. The company doesn't have a stellar track record in the area of safety, either. In 2024, the company employed 39 percent of US warehouse workers but accounted for 56 percent of serious injuries, the Strategic Organizing Center reported last year.

Amazon's new Proteus robot takes plain-language orders, headed to Europe in 2027

The next-generation robot drops the programming interface for conversational commands, the centrepiece of a €10bn European fulfilment investment. The pitch for Amazon's new warehouse robot is that you talk to it. At its "Delivering the Future" event at the Dartford fulfilment centre east of London on 4 June, Amazon unveiled a next-generation Proteus that takes instructions in plain language, no technical commands and no programming interface, alongside a plan to invest more than €10bn (about $11.6bn) in its European fulfilment network over the coming years. The interface is the headline change. "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, describing the robot as an assistant for material movement. Where the current Proteus, deployed at 25 US sites, works only in dock areas moving carts that can weigh close to 400kg, the new version is designed to operate anywhere across a fulfilment or delivery site, transporting containers as they arrive and ferrying them between workstations. It is not shipping yet. The next-generation Proteus is being piloted in Amazon's labs, with European deployment planned for the first half of 2027. That timeline puts it alongside two other systems Amazon is expanding across the region: STARK, a collaborative tote-handling robot first piloted in Barcelona and set to reach 15 European sites by 2027, and Vulcan, the company's first robot with a sense of touch, which has moved from Spokane, Washington to its Hamburg facility in Germany. The money is the larger commitment. Amazon framed the robotics as one piece of a plan to invest more than €10bn modernising European fulfilment, and said it would grow its European fulfilment-centre workforce by 25,000 in the coming years. That headcount figure is the company's answer, stated upfront, to the obvious question about automation and jobs, paired with its claim that robotics has created new categories of work in reliability, maintenance, and engineering. The robots came bundled with a delivery-speed push. Amazon said it will open more than 25 sub-same-day delivery sites across Europe this year, including in Britain and Germany, and expand Amazon Now, its ultra-fast essentials service, to Manchester and Birmingham. Same-day fresh-grocery delivery, it said, now reaches more than 2,300 US cities and parts of Tokyo, with further expansion planned. Its next-generation assistant, Alexa+, is due to launch in 10 more countries in 2027. The spending sits inside a much larger one. In February, Amazon forecast a more than 50% jump in capital expenditure to $200bn this year, joining its peers in an infrastructure build-out driven by AI. Against that, €10bn for European fulfilment is a regional line item rather than the headline, but it is the part with a face on it: a robot that, by 2027, an Amazon worker in Dartford or Hamburg is meant to be able to instruct simply by telling it what to do. Whether it works as smoothly on a live warehouse floor as it does in a lab is the thing the 2027 rollout will actually test.

Inside the busy Amazon warehouse redefining delivery in Europe

Amazon says robots will make work safer and deliveries faster. Euronews Next saw them in action. Amazon used its Delivering the Future event on Thursday in the United Kingdom to make a series of major announcements for Europe, promising billions in new investment, thousands of jobs and a new generation of robots that could reshape the lives of consumers, warehouse workers and the wider logistics economy. More than a hundred journalists and creators gathered at Amazon's busiestwarehouse in Europe, LCY3, located in Dartford, to see how technology is already being used to speed up the journey from click to doorstep, and what else the American giant is bringing to the continent. At more than 216,000 square metres, the facility delivers 4 million units per week, according to the company. The massive facility gives the impression of an industrial amusement park, with 32 kilometres of conveyor belts carrying millions of boxes and totes above your head at warp speed, with warning and safety signs affixed to scaffolds throughout the building. The LCY3 facility already uses robotics and AI software that Amazon says has helped employees work faster and safer. On the second floor, above the conveyor belts, is a floor full of Hercules Drives, a mobile robot built by Amazon. On each floor, 1,660 of them move around 21,700 tall, yellow storage towers known as pods, which human workers have stocked with items following directions from AI software. Beyond a barrier that journalists were not allowed to enter for safety reasons, a swarm of them dashed around quickly and simultaneously, swapping positions with choreographed precision. The blue robots, which resemble oversized robot vacuum cleaners, can lift up to 567 kg, using sensors, 3D cameras and a navigation software to move around the warehouse floor. "[The robot] uses an AI to help navigate the building called Deep Fleet... a bit like going into a city and you have 5,000 cars on the road, and there's no traffic lights to manage all of them. Deep Fleet is there to help coordinate these robots," said Martin Newton, Amazon Tours leader, who took Euronews Next on a guided tour. The robots can also self-report issues for engineers to look at, the tour guide said. Amazon says the robotics and software help optimise space and speed, as well as reduce walking distances and improve accuracy. Once an order is packed by a human, the package passes through a gigantic scanner beaming vibrant neon colours. In the grey, overly lit industrial warehouse, the scanner looks like an unexpected floating disco. Amazon says it is one of the smartest pieces of technology in the entire building. Amazon says the SICK scanner is used to measure the 3D dimensions of each package, read shipping labels and send parcels into the correct lane corresponding to a specific delivery station. "All of that in milliseconds. The package never stops moving. Thousands an hour, every hour, with near-perfect accuracy," Amazon told Euronews Next. From there, packages move through the shipping sorter, which travels 180 km a day inside the facility. How new robots will help humans 'side by side' Amazon's warehouses in Europe, like LCY3, still rely on human hands. Thousands of employees and associates work at the Dartford site each day. They carry out quality control on items, pick orders from inventory towers and pack them at more than 200 stations across each floor. With the new investments, Amazon says the next generation of its Proteus autonomous robot will be able to handle heavy lifting up to 400 kg, reduce physical strain on workers and help support site safety. "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics. "It becomes your assistant for material movement." Euronews saw the previous generation of Proteus, which is currently being used in the United States. But the newer version, which Amazon said would be able to understand conversational prompts from employees, was not presented during the demo. Amazon said the robot is currently being piloted in Amazon's labs, with deployment in Europe planned for the first half of 2027. However, labour organisations and experts have previously warned that warehouse automation can increase pressure on human workers to keep up with machine-driven pace. "We build our machines in service of people," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told Euronews Next. "We build the machines to match the rates of people in their natural movements. We build it as a system of people and machines working together," Brady added. Brady said more robotics would allow employees to focus more on critical thinking, such as spotting a leaking pallet of Nutella before a robot moves it through the sortation area and ends up "covered in chocolate". "When we have great employees and have great machines working together, we can gain the productivity and efficiency gains that we see inside of Amazon while creating a safer environment."

Amazon unveils conversational robot and accelerates warehouse automation

Amazon has revealed a new iteration of its Proteus warehouse robot, now capable of understanding instructions delivered in natural language. Unveiled at the "Delivering the Future" event in London, this evolution allows employees to interact with the machine without specific technical commands. Already operational in 25 US fulfillment centers, Proteus is slated for a phased European rollout starting in 2027. The group also showcased Vulcan, a robot equipped with a sense of touch, alongside the STARK automated handling system. This strategy is part of a vast modernization program backed by a €10bn investment in European logistics operations. Concurrently, Amazon is continuing to streamline its administrative workforce to reallocate capital toward artificial intelligence projects. Following several rounds of job cuts, CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged that AI would reduce certain staffing requirements while creating new roles necessitating different skill sets. Amazon maintains, however, that robotization does not necessarily lead to a decline in employment. According to executives, investments in robotics have generated new technical professions and increased recruitment needs within warehouses. This perspective remains contested by some experts, who argue that the rapid advancement of AI and robotics could displace a growing share of human labor in the long term. In response to the skills shortage, Amazon is simultaneously strengthening its training and apprenticeship programs, particularly in the UK.