Amazon, humans, and robots: we chat with Amazon's HR chief about what's changing

Amazon and robots, including humanoids

Amazon owns a humanoid robot company. It's tested another company's humanoid in its own operations for three years. And yet when I asked the executive responsible for its 1.5 million operations employees whether humanoids will work at Amazon, the answer was a shrug about shape.

"The way we look at it is, it's not about what the robot looks like, it's about what will it do," Ofori Agboka, Amazon's vice president of People Experience and Technology for global operations, told me this week. "What are we trying to solve? And it could come in different forms."

That's not a no. But it's not the yes humanoid makers want to hear from the biggest robot operator on the planet, either.

Context matters, as usual.

Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics in March, folding roughly 50 people and the 42-inch Sprout humanoid into its personal robotics group. Back in October 2023 it started testing Agility's Digit at a research site. Agility has since gone public, and Digit is still the humanoid most associated with Amazon.

But the robot Agboka was most excited to talk about has wheels.

Robots out of the playground

That's Proteus, Amazon's autonomous mobile robot. A new version unveiled in June takes natural-language commands, and it's already running in 25 U.S. fulfillment centers, with Europe up next in the first half of 2027.

"Sometimes there's the robotic drive that's behind the gate, but then we're introducing some that are in front of the gate, such as Proteus," Agboka says. "It's a robot that can interact with the employees and people can speak to it. When people walk in front of it, it knows to stop. You can direct it via your voice through many different languages."

Read that list again: works among people, out from behind the fence, stops for humans, takes spoken instructions in multiple languages.

Those are exactly the selling points humanoid companies pitch for their robots in warehouses. Amazon is getting them from a squat platform that hauls carts of nearly 900 pounds, which is more than any humanoid I'm aware of can carry. For comparison, Apptronik's Apollo, which GXO just committed to at scale with a plan for up to 1,000 units, is rated to carry 55 pounds.

The bar is high for humanoids

None of that means humanoids lose. It means the bar is task-specific, and it's high.

Humanoids win where the job needs hands, reach, and the ability to work in spaces built for people without rebuilding or re-jigging the space. Moving totes between shelves and conveyors, picking from bins at awkward heights, working in older facilities where retrofitting fixed automation doesn't pencil out and more. That's the pitch Agility, Apptronik, Figure and others are making, and the pitch GXO just bought into.

Amazon's position is different, though, because Amazon designs its own buildings. When you own the facility, the robot doesn't have to fit the building. You can redesign the building around the robot, which kills a lot of the case for human form.

So the question for humanoid makers selling into logistics isn't "will Amazon buy humanoids?" It's "which tasks are left once the wheeled robots and the fixed automation have taken their share?"

People and upskilling

There's a second lesson in my conversation with Agboka, and it's about people.

Amazon's frontline workforce is getting comfortable with talking to machines. Besides Proteus, Amazon is rolling out an agentic AI assistant for employees, named after its Peccy mascot, that handles everything from pay and benefits questions to resume updates. Agboka says familiarity is what kills the fear.

"When employees understand they're informed and they use it, they're comfortable with it," he says. "There's not a fear. They really realize how it benefits them and the workplace."

That's good news for any humanoid that ships with a voice interface. The workers it meets on day one may already be used to giving a robot spoken instructions.

The other people story is maintenance. Every robot Amazon adds needs someone to service it, and Agboka sees that as a career path, not an afterthought.

"Because of robots, they need to be maintained, they need to be equipped, and then our employees can focus on those new type of tasks and opportunities," he says.

Amazon trains those people internally through its Mechatronics and Robotics Apprenticeship, which takes warehouse associates and turns them into technicians. Humanoids are far more mechanically complex than a mobile base: dozens of actuators, hands, sensors, batteries. Whoever deploys them at scale will need a lot of technicians, and right now most humanoid companies talk much more about their models than about who fixes the robot at 3 a.m.

Agboka thinks the whole industry has that blind spot.

"I didn't see enough about education and skills training, personally," he says of the physical AI talks at Web Summit in Lisbon. "I feel like as everyone leads into physical AI, we're so excited about robotics, we're not talking enough about all the other pieces and the people."

Amazon will put humanoids to work when one does a job better than the alternatives. Until then, the humanoid companies that win logistics deals will probably be the ones that show up with a training plan as well as a robot.

Sources

• Amazon's humanoid robot for the home: Sprout — HumanoidMegaHub
• Agility is public — HumanoidMegaHub
• GXO Doubles Down On Humanoids With Plan For Up To 1,000 Apptronik Robots — Forbes
• Amazon to test Agility Robotics' humanoid robot — IoT World Today
• Amazon's next-gen Proteus heads to Europe — TechRepublic
• GXO announces R&D initiative with Apptronik — GXO