The Robots That Handle Your Amazon Orders
A visit to a fulfillment center, where machines move merchandise and tell humans what to do with it.
By Vitaliy Katsenelson
Martin KozlowskiWhen I was invited recently to tour an Amazon distribution center in Denver with a few colleagues, I jumped at the opportunity.
Like most people, I order regularly from Amazon but had never seen the machinery behind those quick deliveries.
I was curious about the logistical marvel that could get a package from click to doorstep—sometimes in a few hours.
What I expected was impressive efficiency and scale.
What I found was more remarkable and more unsettling than I had imagined.
The distribution center’s job is straightforward: receive goods from suppliers, sort and store them, then fulfill customer orders by packaging items and loading them onto trucks.
This particular center wasn’t responsible for final delivery—it sends already-labeled packages to smaller centers closer to customers, which hand them off to carriers like UPS, the post office or Amazon’s own delivery fleet.
The first thing that hits you is the noise.
The conveyor belts running through the facility are so loud that we needed headsets to protect our hearing.
The building is enormous—about 1 million square feet, roughly 20 football fields.
It’s divided into three distinct areas.
The perimeter is a lit walkway that allows goods to flow in and out of the building.
About one-third of the center looks like a normal warehouse where humans work.
But the largest portion of the facility is dark except for the light that leaks over from adjacent zones.
This is where inventory is stored on thousands of yellow shelves, each 5 feet square at the base and 8 feet tall.
The robots swarming around look like electric orange self-driving lawn mowers in a coordinated dance, giving one another the right of way.
They slide under shelves, lift them a few inches and ferry them around the dark area.
A fence separates the dark zone from the rest of the facility, protecting humans from robots and the inventory from humans.
Only specially trained employees can enter when equipment malfunctions or an item falls off a shelf.
Unlike at Home Depot, where knives are with knives and bolts are with bolts, almost all the inventory here is stored on shelves scattered throughout the dark zones completely at random.
Amazon’s computers keep track of millions of items across thousands of shelves—they know not only which shelf contains each item, but exactly where it’s placed on that shelf.
All human interaction with the shelves happens at the “DMZ”—the boundary between the light and dark zones, where the loading and picking stations are located.
At loading stations, employees take merchandise from yellow bins and place it onto shelves for storage.
At picking stations, they retrieve merchandise from shelves and put it into yellow bins.
Both stations look similar, and there are hundreds of them.
Each is staffed by one employee who follows pictorial instructions on several overhead screens.
For loading, he might see a visual instructing him to take an item from bin 2 and place it on the right side of shelf level 5.
If he is picking, the computer might tell him to take the item pictured from the middle of shelf level 4 and put it into bin 5.
A light shines on the correct one of the five numbered bins in front of the employee.
Multiple cameras monitor the employee’s movements, recording where each item is placed.
Computers track the time it takes to load or unload each item, and a single screen displays the employee’s statistics.
Amazon has gamified the process so that pickers and loaders can compete against one another using their times as inputs.
Every hour, the computer interrupts the workflow to provide short, guided stretching exercises.
As I talked about this distribution center with my colleagues, I remarked that the dark side of the fence where the robots roam looked dystopian, like something out of “Black Mirror.”
A colleague offered a more chilling assessment: “It’s the humans that look dystopian.”
He was right.
Employees work four 10-hour shifts a week and exercise zero judgment.
They simply follow detailed computer instructions, mindlessly moving items from one place to another.
It’s just them and the yellow bins and shelves.
As we discussed automation with our guide, we learned this facility was a “Version 9,” designed in 2015 (though I imagine the software running the automations is days old).
The newest fulfillment centers are Version 13, with even more robots.
It’s easy to predict how this story will end—these distribution centers will go entirely dark, as robots don’t need light.
The only question is when it will happen.
This facility is run by sophisticated algorithms housed in an Amazon Web Services facility hundreds of miles away.
From the moment an order is placed, every decision is made by these algorithms—not artificial intelligence, but millions of lines of preprogrammed code.
A software system decides which facility to send the order to.
Once the order arrives, the lawn-mower-like robots start moving shelves.
The system then provides pictorial instructions to the humans on what to pick, where to place it and which truck to load.
One day soon, it’s safe to predict, most of the humans won’t be necessary to run the distribution center.
Robots will perform almost all tasks; people will be there only to troubleshoot edge cases.
Today, this facility employs 3,100 people.
Fully automated, combining robotics with AI-driven coordination, it may need only 100.
What will the other 3,000 do?
Mr. Katsenelson is CEO and chief investment officer of Investment Management Associates.
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