The push toward automation comes as businesses say they can't hire warehouse workers fast enough to meet surging online demand for everything from furniture to frozen food in pandemic-disrupted supply chains. The crunch is accelerating the adoption of robots and other technology in a sector that still largely relies on workers pulling carts. Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. "This is not about taking over your job, it's about taking care of those jobs we can't fill," said Kristi Montgomery, vice president of innovation, research and development for Kenco Logistics Services LLC, a third-party logistics provider based in Chattanooga, Tenn. Kenco is rolling out a fleet of self-driving robots from Locus Robotics Corp. to bridge a labor gap by helping workers fill online orders at the company's largest e-commerce site, in Jeffersonville, Ind.

For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon "associate", in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. "When I get home," she says, "it's about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. Anna is a picker in one of the company's most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the "totes" destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot "drives": squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift "pods" – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers. Everything has to happen quickly. According to the all-important metric by which a picker's performance is measured, Anna says she has to average 360 items an hour, or around 3,800 a day. In March, the Covid-19 lockdown meant that customer orders suddenly rocketed. Anna says that lots of her colleagues started putting in overtime, and new recruits arrived en masse. "They hired a lot of people," she says. "I thought there should have been fewer people in the warehouse, to have distancing." "They took out some of the tables because of 2-metre distancing, but it was impossible to find a free table or chair.

While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4 Over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. It's likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.5 In the near term, our analysis suggests, large government job losses are unlikely. But cognitive technologies will change the nature of many jobs--both what gets done and how workers go about doing it--freeing up to one quarter of many workers' time to focus on other activities.

In the spring of 1960, just after he turned 16, Chuck Stout went to work as a "garbage boy" at a McDonald's in Toledo, Ohio. For 85 cents an hour, he swept and mopped the floors, kept the drive-in lot tidy, filled the shake machine, and washed dishes. It was an escape--somewhere to go that wasn't the Weiler Homes public housing complex, where he lived with his mother and sister. They were barely scraping by. "My mom drank so much," he says, "she didn't know what I was doing." Not only did Chuck love his job, the job loved him. He went from garbage boy to french fry maker to burger cook to cashier. He became a manager, then a supervisor, then a field consultant, then a professor at Hamburger University, where McDonald's trains new franchise owners and managers. By 1976, Chuck was serving as a director of product development for the entire corporation. The next year, he was on the team that brought ice cream sundaes to the chain's menu. For the effort, Chuck was rewarded with a handsome bonus and a personal letter from founder Ray Kroc, whose wisdom Chuck was fond of quoting from memory. Chuck eventually got fed up with corporate culture and told his superiors he wanted to go back out "in the field." When two planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, he was 57 and running his own McDonald's franchise in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He rushed to Manhattan, where for three days he loaded up Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and coffee, first onto a luggage trolley, then a golf cart, and hauled them down to the debris pit to feed rescuers.

While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4 Over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. It's likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.5 In the near term, our analysis suggests, large government job losses are unlikely. But cognitive technologies will change the nature of many jobs--both what gets done and how workers go about doing it--freeing up to one quarter of many workers' time to focus on other activities.

While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4 Over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. It's likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.5 In the near term, our analysis suggests, large government job losses are unlikely. But cognitive technologies will change the nature of many jobs--both what gets done and how workers go about doing it--freeing up to one quarter of many workers' time to focus on other activities.

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have sought to enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks once thought to be reserved for humans. In recent years, the technology has moved from science fiction into real life: AI programs can play games, recognize faces and speech, learn, and make informed decisions. As striking as AI programs may be (and as potentially unsettling to filmgoers suffering periodic nightmares about robots becoming self-aware and malevolent), the cognitive technologies behind artificial intelligence are already having a real impact on many people's lives and work. AI-based technologies include machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics;1 they are powerful, scalable, and improving at an exponential rate. Developers are working on implementing AI solutions in everything from self-driving cars to swarms of autonomous drones, from "intelligent" robots to stunningly accurate speech translation.2 And the public sector is seeking--and finding--applications to improve services; indeed, cognitive technologies could eventually revolutionize every facet of government operations. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration and Services has created a virtual assistant, EMMA, that can respond accurately to human language. EMMA uses its intelligence simply, showing relevant answers to questions--almost a half-million questions per month at present. Learning from her own experiences, the virtual assistant gets smarter as she answers more questions. Customer feedback tells EMMA which answers helped, honing her grasp of the data in a process called "supervised learning."3 While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4