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Amazon is reportedly developing a humanoid robot that will be able to do the most customer-facing aspect of the company — deliver packages.
Why It Hits: The robot race is in full swing, with Tesla, Agility, Google, Nvidia, and so many others working on humanoids. Yes, everyone is trying to recreate I, Robot in an effort to build a never-tiring workforce. You’ll soon be competing with bots for blue-collar jobs.
Between the Orders: Humanoid delivery robots would be quite the update to Prime.
- Amazon is almost done building a “humanoid park” of indoor obstacle courses at one of the company’s offices in San Francisco. There, the robots will be able to trial-run several different delivery environments.
- The tech giant is also developing the foundational AI models that would power these robots, yesterday announcing a new R&D group focused on robotics and agentic systems.
- The company hopes that these robots will eventually be able to jump on and off its fleet of Rivian EV delivery trucks — 20,000 of which are already on the road.
Last Mile: The big question at the center of this development is “what happens to Amazon’s massive workforce of delivery drivers?” To no one’s surprise, the company is not eager to address that question, although The Information says it’s possible that humans could theoretically still operate the truck, while the robots hop on and off to make deliveries. Or they could work in tandem with humans to deliver more packages in an area more quickly — a similar ambition to Veho’s partnership with RIVR.
Prediction: Considering that Amazon is also heavily invested in autonomous-vehicle startup Zoox and already has robots working in the warehouses, the company’s shipping operation could one day become a bot-only enterprise.
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