For the 2015 holiday season, Amazon’s workforce consisted of about 30,000 robots and 230,000 employees. Now, the retailer owns 45,000 robots, marking a 50 percent increase from the year prior. (Amazon’s total number of employees for the fourth quarter of 2016 has not been released yet.)
The robots populating Amazon’s warehouses were developed by Kiva Systems, which the retailer acquired in 2012. While human workers are still responsible for the stowing and picking of items, the robots have taken on many of the other warehouse processes.
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