A Sam's Club worker used to worry a robot might take his job — instead, AI replaced his most tiresome task

• Sam's Club uses a system of floor-scrubbing robots that have AI inventory scanners.
• These devices have done work that once required an employee to walk every aisle checking inventory.

When it comes to the impact of AI and automation on the workplace, there's no one-size-fits-all verdict yet.

A global study published by Accenture in 2022 found that more than 40% of warehouse workers and front-line managers expressed "negative sentiment" about automation potentially leading to their replacement.

"I had general sense of fear of losing my job to robots," a Sam's Club forklift operator told Business Insider. "But after seeing the company's approach to it, I don't think I'm losing my job specifically in the near future."

The worker, who requested anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the media, said his attitude shifted after the Walmart-owned warehouse club rolled out a new fleet of floor-scrubbing robots at US locations starting in 2022.

Not only do these robots clean the warehouse floors autonomously, Sam's Club CEO Chris Nicholas says they're also equipped with AI-enabled cameras, which "do 23 million scans a day in our clubs of all of the inventory all around the club, including what's on the floor."

The forklift driver told BI that before these machines arrived, one of his tasks at the end of each shift was to walk through every aisle of the warehouse making note of which items he needed to prioritize when he clocked in at 4 a.m. the next morning.

Thanks to computer vision and artificial intelligence, the robot floor scrubbers now generate that list automatically, giving him more time to do more enjoyable parts of his job.

And the more he sees what these automated systems can do, the more he understands what they can't.

"They're gonna need me to work on the freight anyway," he said, referring to unloading pallets of merchandise from trucks. "They need a human — a robot cannot work on the freight."

Sam's Club's CEO also said in a recent interview with Jefferies that he wants these tools to free up workers' time to help customers.

"It's a very human thing," Nicholas said. "By them doing fewer things that they don't want to do, they get to spend time with the people that we should be spending time with."