Amazon isn’t hiding what it wants to do with artificial intelligence and robotics.
According to Susan Li’s reporting for Fox Business, the company is openly trying to redesign the work inside its warehouses and fulfillment centers from the ground up.
And a big part of that plan is getting people out of “menial, mundane and repetitive” jobs – by handing them to machines.
A Bold Promise To Kill “Mundane” Work
Speaking with Susan Li at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Amazon’s CTO of Robotics, Tye Brady, laid out his philosophy in very direct terms.
“I’m not shy about the fact that I want to eliminate every menial, mundane and repetitive job out there,” Brady said.
He added that this isn’t just a vague dream.
“That’s what we do inside of Amazon,” Brady told Li, describing how robotics and AI are being used specifically to strip away repetitive tasks from the workday.
On one level, you can hear the appeal.
Nobody grows up dreaming of lifting the same boxes or scanning the same barcodes for ten hours straight.
But when you say you want to “eliminate” those jobs, not just make them easier, you are also talking about eliminating the positions that currently pay a lot of people’s rent.
That tension sits at the center of Li’s article.
Massive Job Cuts Meet Massive Automation
Li points out that this automation push is arriving at the same time as big cuts higher up the ladder.
Amazon recently announced 14,000 corporate job cuts as part of a broad internal restructuring.
CEO Andy Jassy has blamed that on over-hiring during the COVID pandemic, when the company added “extra layers of middle management,” more locations, and more lines of business that later had to be trimmed back.
He now argues those reductions are necessary to keep Amazon “nimble” as AI reshapes how the entire company operates.
Li notes that Amazon’s workforce has roughly tripled since 2018, reaching about 1.5 million employees last year – just below its 2021 peak of 1.6 million.
So this isn’t a shrinking company.
It’s a giant that is cutting corporate roles, automating warehouse work, and still operating at an enormous scale.
From a business perspective, that looks like efficiency.
From a worker’s perspective, it looks like the walls are closing in from both directions.
Upskilling As A Safety Net – Or A Sales Pitch?
To balance that picture, Li reports that Amazon is pledging $2.5 billion over five years to retrain employees and communities.
The goal, according to the company, is to help people adapt to “the changing demands of the workplace” as AI and robotics take over more tasks.
Brady tells Li that Amazon – and in his view, any tech company – has “a responsibility to upskill your employees.”
He says Amazon is “committed to those efforts because we realize that jobs will change.”
He also argues that “right now is the right time” to invest in this upskilling, given how fast generative AI is spreading.
On paper, $2.5 billion is a serious number.
It signals that Amazon knows the disruption is real and wants to show it’s doing something more than simply laying people off and rolling in robots.
At the same time, the company plans to spend more than $125 billion this year overall, with most of that going into its cloud and AI infrastructure.
Set next to that larger figure, the training budget suddenly looks more modest — important, but clearly not the main event.
It’s fair to say Amazon is primarily building the future machines first and then trying to help people catch up to them.
Inside Amazon’s Robot-Powered Warehouse
Li’s article also highlights what Amazon Robotics is actually rolling out.
Brady describes robotic arms that can now pack boxes – work that has traditionally been done by human associates at packing stations.
He also points to Amazon’s Vulcan robot, which he says has a “sense of touch.”
That kind of capability lets a robot handle items with much more finesse than older, clumsier machines.
These aren’t science-fiction demos.
They are part of a real push to staff Amazon’s fulfillment centers with many more robots operating alongside human workers.
Brady tells Li that, for now, Amazon manufactures its robots in Massachusetts.
That means the automation push is itself creating a different kind of job — engineering, manufacturing, maintenance.
But those are specialized roles.
They don’t automatically absorb every warehouse worker whose “menial” tasks get automated away.
Brady, who has spent more than 40 years in technology, calls generative AI “probably the most transformative technology” he has seen in his career.
When someone with that much experience says that, it tells you this is not just about faster conveyor belts.
It’s about changing what counts as human work in the first place.
The Human Cost Of “Menial”
Li’s reporting keeps circling back to the same basic truth: jobs and tasks are going to change.
Brady insists they will evolve rather than simply vanish.
But the language he uses – “eliminate every menial, mundane and repetitive job” – makes clear that Amazon isn’t just trying to make those jobs slightly nicer.
It is trying to remove them from the org chart where it can.
There is an upside here that’s easy to see.
If robots can take over the most physically punishing and mind-numbing work, fewer human beings will get injured, burned out, or bored senseless on the warehouse floor.
The question is whether Amazon will consistently turn that freed-up human capacity into better roles with more autonomy and better pay, or whether the people who used to do those tasks will simply be pushed to the margins.
Li’s article doesn’t pretend to answer that fully.
What it does show, through Brady’s own words, is how candid Amazon has become about its ambitions.
This isn’t a quiet, backroom automation strategy anymore.
It’s a front-stage talking point: eliminate the mundane, scale the machines, retrain those who can move up.
For workers, that honesty is both useful and unsettling.
You know exactly what the company is aiming at.
The hard part is making sure that when the “menial, mundane” jobs are gone, the people who used to do them aren’t gone with them.
Raised in a small Arizona town, Kevin grew up surrounded by rugged desert landscapes and a family of hunters. His background in competitive shooting and firearms training has made him an authority on self-defense and gun safety. A certified firearms instructor, Kevin teaches others how to properly handle and maintain their weapons, whether for hunting, home defense, or survival situations. His writing focuses on responsible gun ownership, marksmanship, and the role of firearms in personal preparedness.
