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Hey, one of the things that we love to talk about robotics, technology, automation. Bloomberg Weekend recently reported app that humanoid robots are coming as soon as they learn to fold clothes. Count me in.
Okay, okay.
Why they wrote this? Apparently the team attended a recent Silicon Valley summit and there they saw small robots roaming and pouring lattes while evangelists hailed new AI techniques as transformative, but full size prototypes you're pretty scarce.
Okay.
I want to see what typ Brady has to say about this. He's chief technologists at Amazon Robotics. Tye is also founding partner of Mass Robotics. It's a not for profit organization that's become the world's largest robotics innovation center and serves on a number of boards promote stem learning and advancement. Ty good to have you back on the program.
Happy holidays. I want to get to this idea of humanoid robots, because it doesn't matter if a humanoid robat can fold laundry for a lot of the purposes that you have for Amazon, How are robots apart from the Kiva robots used right now in Amazon warehouses.
Well, thanks Tim, thanks for having me on, Carol, it'd been nice to hear you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the show and talk all things robotics and tech with you. Indeed, the age of physical ais here, Amazon is building our physical aias systems to help better the customer experience, expanding our selection, lowering cost, fueling the faster delivery times that we know our customers love.
But given your question, think of that very practical everyday experience where we're doing this at a very high reliability and scalingness, where we're shipping millions and millions of products every day here for the holiday season. It's really exciting to see. It's very real, it's very practical, and it's something that we're very proud of in what we're doing with our employees.
All Right, we want to talk about this, you know, we do, and we will. But I do want to pick your brains because I always feel like I learned so much, you know when you join us.
Bring it?
Is that so these humanoid robots, I mean Elon's working on on other people. Is it years away? What's your thought, your expertise you know this world.
I do know this world. I will tell you that we usually start with what problem are we trying to solve? What's the problem we're trying to solve. And once we figure out the problem, then we actually go to functions. What functions should the robotics should the physical AI systems do? Right, So, from the functionality it should it fold laundry? Should it do your dishes? Then we derive form and you kind of get the KRT ahead of the horse when you start with form first, and then see how can you
apply this technology? And we don't do technology for technology's sake inside of Amazon. What we do is we solve problems. We solve problems, every day problems at an incredible scale that actually advances the state of the art in robotics. Right, So, if you want to a robot to washer dishes, well, congratulations you have that. You don't necessarily need a humanoid
form to wash your dishes. As a matter of fact, it'd be kind of comical to see a robot pick up the dish, pick up a sponge, you know, put the soap on it, scrub the dish, and put it in the drying rack. When you have this really practical robot in your kitchen today called the dishwasher, which is amazing. It blends right into the woodwork. So we think about function first and then allow the form to follow.
Okay, so we want to talk specifics here about what's happening in the warehouses blue Jay and a Luna and more your systems blue Jay Robotics, Luna agentic AI delivery Glasses, Amazon's warehouses. These are well known for robotics in the use of tech and AI. How does all of that continue to evolve and specifically impact productivity side by side with human work?
Absolutely? Yeah. So the word I want to use is supercharge. We're supercharging the world's largest fleet of robotics out there with AI, using AI systems to better the reasoning and to better assist our employees.
Right.
We want to eliminate the menial, the mundane, and the repetitive through the use of robotics as a tool set for employees. And we're entering this era where foundation models are making a robot smarter, more affordable, more adaptable, more conversational, and really reshaping work as we know it, not just an e commerce but actually across the industries and create new kinds of jobs.
I'm jumping in because right now we're showing for those who are watching on TV and YouTube and our streaming service, what looks like your special delivery glasses. As we continue to show this, just tell us what they're all about. They look like normal glasses. But what do they enable a driver to do more easily?
Yeah, well, it's the fundamental princess that we have is to use them as a tool set. So allow the driver to understand where the delivery should be, allow them to be kind of hands free in order to take the picture of the package at your door, Allow them to understand what's the best route to the customer's door, allow them to see their delivery notes of where they should place that the delivery at the right spot that's just right for our customer. I mean, we're customer obsessed.
So any tool that we can give our deliver every employees or or frontline employees, that's what that's how we want to use technology.
Are they are they rolled out?
I think that we're still in the early stages of deployment.
So when would they be fully rolled out across the network?
Hard to tell. Would it be.
Within a year, maybe within twenty twenty six.
Yeah, we're pretty We're we are a pretty Once we get to the alpha and beta deployment, it's typically within it about a year that you'll see this starting to roll out, and we take a very measured approach. When things roll out, we test it. We make sure it's great for our employees. Does it add value for our employees, does it create a safer environment for employees? And then we'll test that at a smaller scale, and then we go into the you know, the millions and millions of scale.
Hey, I want to go back to Blue Jay in a Luna timber on arapp. Blue Jay your next generation robotics systems system. Excuse me, and a Luna is an agentic AI system, So talk to us about that. How much are they deployed today across your fulfillment fulfillment network? And I'm curious about milestones we should all be watching out for in the next twelve to twenty four months time.
Sure. So at Luna we're actually using kind of in a monitor in a monitor only manner right now during peak right we actually just just went through the peak of peaks where we have our largest outbound happening. Just actually yesterday, And what a Luna does is it gives operators a complete real time view to help guide their
every move right. So think of many many dashboards now can be consolidated into human consumable texts, human consumable recommendations of how to actually deploy the network and how to deploy various robotics inside that building in a way that it gains these more efficiencies. So we're seeing that that is rolling out today, and then we're really excited about blue Jay as well. You can think of this really
for our sub same day network. That's a growing network they have inside of Amazon where we're getting the goods right to the customer and a matter of hours. What blue Jay does is it really indexes on a smaller footprint. You can think of this as three assembly lines kind of combined into one, where we have robotic arms picking orders for our customers out of our containerized storage as systems and allowing those to be delivered right to the customer's door. That's really an exciting time.
So if we think about this time right now, the holiday peak where people are trying to get stuff as quick as possible. Specifically, where does the tech that you just outlined have the biggest impact. Is it smoothing labor variability, preventing bottlenecks? It doesn't improve on time delivery metrics. Is it all the above? Is it something I didn't even mention?
Yeah, it is all the above plus or what it's allowing us to do is really exception handling. Right when we think about robotics, and you think robotics and physical AI at scale, when you ship millions and millions every day, just one percent of exception handling can kind of each eat your lunch. So any tools that we have to help us with the exception handling that maybe one of the systems is not picking up a particular object right, so that learning needs to be propagated through our other
manipulation systems. Or maybe a mobility system is having some bottlenecks because of the way the inventory is stored inside of the building. People have really good skills of critical reasoning at critical thinking and using common sense. So tools that allow them to understand the situation better, perceive their environment better through the use of robotics, and then have truly physical agents to help with that in concert with
our employees. Is that allow us to deal with all the exceptions that we see every day, especially at peak.
Hey, Ty, just got about a minute left here. And I know we've talked about this with you before, and I think it's a fair question, and you guys have addressed it about the impact on your workforce. And I wonder if it's smarter to think about maybe not that what you guys are doing in terms of automation or other companies for that matter, that it means doing away with workers, but maybe it means that you will have to hire fewer workers in the future. Is that fair?
Well, first of all, Carly, any question you ask is fair, So I think it is spared always asks those questions, and we should always kind of have the mindset of people first, in which we do inside of Amazon. So what are we doing specifically for our employees? And I'm really proud of this. We're building better machines for them,
We're listening to the iterating our designs. We're rolling out a tool set from them to use that every day at scale a scale it's almost unimaginable when it comes to what we've done inside of robotics, we're upscaling them. We have a two point five billion dollar pledge that we call Future Ready to prepare fifty million people for how technology will impact and change not only the nature
of work, but also what their everyday lives. And we're also creating a safer environment with our robotics, eliminating the repetitive, the menial, the mundane, allowing machines to do the heavy lifting and the repetitive actions, and allowing people to work with them in order to use this beautiful thing here