For the last decade, Amazon has been building an army of robot employees to sort packages and move products safely around its warehouses. Now the company has unveiled its latest robot called Proteus, which it describes as its'first fully autonomous mobile robot'. Proteus is designed to work alongside humans, moving large trolleys full of packages around the warehouse floor. The robot uses Amazon's own safety, perception, and navigation technology to move around autonomously and avoid bumping into human workers. 'Historically, it's been difficult to safely incorporate robotics in the same physical space as people,' the company said in a blog post.

It may look like a nightmare sequence from a science fiction film, but a network of fast-working robots is now hard at work in East London. British grocery giant Ocado is using an army of robots at its 563,000 square foot warehouse in Erith next to the Thames to gather up items for customer orders. More than 2,000 robots are working there non-stop for 20 hours a day, each picking up to 2 million food items in a shift – far beyond the capability of a human worker. The eight-wheeled robots scoot around a giant grid-like structure called the'Hive', so-called for its honeycomb-like holes that contain inventory. Powered by an algorithm, the robots pick up crates of items to take to a human to put into shopping bags for delivery.

A DECADE AGO Amazon started to introduce robots into its "fulfilment centres", as online retailers call their giant distribution warehouses. Instead of having people wandering up and down rows of shelves picking goods to complete orders, the machines would lift and then carry the shelves to the pickers. That saved time and money. Amazon now has more than 350,000 robots of various sorts deployed worldwide. But it is not enough to secure its future.

Black boxes rattle along miles of conveyor belt, carrying everything from toys to painkillers amid a cacophony of alarms and the faint hum of Christmas songs. "I'm looking around here at anything that might not be right, but it's actually running very smoothly," says David Tindal, the general manager of the Swindon fulfilment centre. "The team has been fantastic. We spend the whole year preparing for this peak time, like a good football club preparing for the cup final." Known internally as BRS2 – using a naming system based on the nearest big airport (in this case, Bristol) – the warehouse is a vision in gleaming concrete, steel and glass landed on the Wiltshire countryside.

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.

Artificial intelligence has become one of the central pillars of eCommerce businesses. Starting from predicting the right products to outsourcing customer support by having a free-flowing chat with an AI-driven chatbot – AI's omnipresent existence is not to be ignored. But rather than stopping at that, AI has also crept into the operational half of the businesses where it deals with the challenges related to the logistics. Here are 5 ways that an AI-powered tool can improve the deliverability of your eComm business. Warehouse automation – Warehousing is often an underrated yet one of the most crucial components of a successful e-retail business.

Last month I took part in a debate on the'future of technology in retail and whether technology could replace humans....' Subsequently, I've pulled together some thoughts for Inside Retail (also published here). For the past decade, advancements in technology have been disrupting what seems like most facets of the human experience. And with what feels like monthly advances in technology, it's no surprise the retail industry is accelerating globally in innovation and experimentation. According to Gartner, worldwide retail-tech spending will increase by 3.6% to $203.6 billion in 2019, surpassing most other industries with regard to technology spend. With customer support now on instant, 24-hour demand, voice and chat assistants have quickly taken the place of most traditional online help platforms and traditional services.

Some of Amazon's warehouse workers don't have to choose between work and play with the introduction of company-created video games that turn tedious tasks into productive fun. A detailed report from The Washington Post describes how the company has installed screens at many of its warehouse workers' stations that allow employees to turn tasks like assembling orders and moving items into competitive games. Game titles include options like MissionRacer, Dragon Duel, and CastleCrafter and typically involve a productivity-based point system. The more tasks a worker completes, the more points or progress they make in the game. Amazon is using video games to help increase productivity and make working in its warehouses less tedious.

Amazon said that by the end of the next decade packages in the company's warehouses could be readied for delivery without touching a single human hand. In a report from Reuters, Director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, Scott Anderson, told reporters that there is still plenty of progress to be made before robots take over its warehouses. 'In the current form, the technology is very limited. The technology is very far from the fully automated workstation that we would need,' Anderson told Reuters in a walk through of one of its facilities in Baltimore. Robots still have a long way to go before the replace human hands in Amazon's factories said one of the company's executives in a recent walk through of a facility in Baltimore.

AMAZON'S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like "not much" are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which mines data for patterns that can be used to make predictions.