Amazon’s Next Big Move: Replacing Over 500,000 Jobs With Robots

Shrinking Headcounts, Without Saying “Layoffs”

The automation strategy has already begun. In Shreveport, Louisiana, Amazon’s most advanced fulfillment center is running with 25% fewer workers thanks to over 1,000 robots. By next year, that number could jump to 50%.

In Georgia, the story is more sobering. Amazon’s Stone Mountain warehouse, once a major source of stable employment, is being converted into a robotic facility. Internal projections show the site could need 1,200 fewer employees once retrofitting is complete. No pink slips are being handed out—but the company expects workers to quietly disappear through attrition.

And that’s the pattern. No layoffs, no announcements—just a slow drain of jobs.

Rebranding Automation to Soften the Blow

Internal communications show that Amazon is carefully managing the narrative. Teams have been advised to avoid words like “AI” and “automation”, instead using euphemisms like “advanced technology” or “cobot” (short for “collaborative robot”). At the same time, Amazon is ramping up its local PR efforts—getting involved in community events and charities to maintain goodwill in places where jobs may quietly vanish.

Amazon claims these strategies are unrelated to automation. But the documents tell a different story: they reveal a conscious effort to control public perception as job losses mount.

A Bigger Threat to Blue-Collar America

This isn’t just an Amazon problem. If Amazon, the second-largest U.S. employer, successfully pulls off large-scale automation, it sets a precedent for other major employers like Walmart and UPS.

MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu put it bluntly:

“Once Amazon figures out how to automate profitably, it will spread to others too. One of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer.”

Amazon says the jobs of the future will be more technical—think robotics technicians and engineers. But these roles require new skills, training, and certifications. And the company’s existing mechatronics apprenticeship program, while promising, has only trained about 5,000 people since 2019—nowhere near enough to offset hundreds of thousands of disappearing jobs.

What It Means

Amazon insists it’s not laying people off. But in practice, it’s doing something more subtle—and possibly more damaging. By not replacing workers who leave and by designing entire warehouses to run with half the labor, it’s quietly shrinking its workforce in ways that don’t make headlines.

For the job seeker refreshing the page every 10 seconds, or the warehouse worker wondering why new hires have stopped coming in, the outcome is the same: the job is gone—just not officially.

Source: Amazon’s Next Big Move: Replacing Over 500,000 Jobs With Robots