The company’s retail division workers largely moved into product and program manager jobs - fast-growing roles within Amazon that typically belong to professional inventors. You’re like, ‘OK, as a business this makes sense.’”Īlthough some companies might have seen an opportunity to reduce head count, Amazon assigned the employees new work. “On the other hand, you’re also not surprised. “When we heard that ordering was going to be automated by algorithms, on the one hand, it’s like, ‘OK, what’s happening to my job?’” another former employee, Elaine Kwon, told me. “Something that you were incentivized to do, now you’re being disincentivized to do.” Yet in time, many saw the logic. “It was a total change,” the former employee mentioned above said. The retail division employees were despondent at first, recognizing that their jobs were transforming. The transition to Hands off the Wheel wasn’t easy. Having delivered on his project, Herbrich left the company in 2020. “In 2016, my goals for Hands off the Wheel were 80% of all my activity,” one ex-employee told me.” By 2018 Hands off the Wheel was part of business as usual. Leadership required employees to automate a large number of tasks, though that varied across divisions. If the system couldn’t make its own decisions, he explained, it couldn’t learn. “It took a few years to slowly roll it out, because there was training to be done,” Herbrich said. But at that point the humans could override the suggestions, and many did, setting back progress.Įventually, though, automation took hold. By 2015, the team’s machine-learning predictions were good enough that Amazon’s leadership placed them in employees’ software tools, turning them into a kind of copilot for human workers. Getting the software to be good at inventory management and pricing predictions took years, Herbrich told me, because his team had to account for low-volume product orders that befuddled its data-hungry machine-learning algorithms. The project began in 2012, when Amazon hired Ralf Herbrich as its director of machine learning and made the automation effort one of his launch projects. “When you have actions that can be predicted over and over again, you don’t need people doing them,” Neil Ackerman, an ex-Amazon general manager, told me. But with two decades’ worth of retail data at its disposal, Amazon’s leadership decided to use “the force” (machine learning) to handle the formulaic processes involved in keeping warehouses stocked. At the time, employees in Amazon’s retail management division spent their days making deals and working out product promotions as well as determining what items to stock in its warehouses, in what quantities, and for what price. The animating idea behind Hands off the Wheel originated at Amazon’s South Lake Union office towers, where the company began automating work in the mid-2010s under an initiative some called Project Yoda. As companies look at how to integrate increasingly powerful AI capabilities into their businesses, they’d do well to consider this example. The strategy appears to have paid off: At a time when it’s possible to start new businesses faster and cheaper than ever before, Hands off the Wheel has kept Amazon operating nimbly, propelled it ahead of its competitors, and shown that automating in order to fire can mean missing big opportunities. The purpose was not to eliminate jobs but to automate tasks so that the company could reassign people to build new products - to do more with the people on staff, rather than doing the same with fewer people. After one short interaction, it was clear that some have it completely wrong.įor the past decade, Amazon has been pushing to automate office work under a program now known as Hands off the Wheel. I was at the conference because after spending months researching how Amazon automates work at its headquarters, I was eager to learn how other firms thought about this powerful technology. At an automation conference in late 2018, a high-ranking banking official looked up from his buffet plate and stated his objective without hesitation: I’m here, he told me, to eliminate full-time employees.
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