Amazon robots plan counts 600,000 jobs, its flagship robot lasted months

Internal Amazon documents obtained by The New York Times put numbers on the automation plan: avoid hiring more than 160,000 US workers by 2027, hold US headcount flat while sales double by 2033, and skip 600,000 hires along the way. The robotics team wants 75% of operations automated, and the saving comes to 30 cents on every item packed and delivered.

What the plan promises

Blue Jay carried those numbers into a building. Amazon unveiled the ceiling-mounted multi-arm system in October 2025, said it could pick, stow and consolidate about 75% of the item types it stores, and built it in roughly a year. In February the company stopped running it, citing cost, manufacturing complexity and testing problems. Development ran about twice as long as deployment.

Amazon robots already number more than a million across the network, more than any other company on earth, and Project Eluna, the AI agent announced beside Blue Jay, stayed in service to read building data and flag bottlenecks. Set against the 600,000 hires the documents want to skip, that is 1.7 machines already deployed for every job the plan removes, and the plan still has seven years to run.

“Advanced technology and cobot, instead of automation and AI”

— Amazon, Internal documents, per The New York Times

What one robot did

The 30 cents sets the scale. Saving $1m takes 3.3 million items packed and delivered, so the plan depends on volume as much as on machines, and volume is the part Amazon controls least.

The documents also cover vocabulary. Amazon weighed dropping «automation» and «AI» for «advanced technology» and «cobot», and joining parades and toy drives. Twelve days earlier the US government renamed AI by executive order, and the federal pages changed in under two weeks while Nvidia's homepage kept the old word.

What checks itself

Amazon says the documents reflect one team's view rather than company hiring strategy, and that seasonal recruiting continues. The 160,000 figure carries a 2027 deadline and US headcount appears in every quarterly filing, so the claim checks itself. A warehouse worker reading this has a date to watch rather than a prediction to argue with. The same arithmetic runs through our test of agent fleets, where fourteen parallel agents worked seven days to answer one question: machines arrive in numbers long before they arrive in results.

Informational material, not investment advice. The hiring figures come from internal documents reported by The New York Times, and Amazon says they reflect one team's view rather than company strategy.