Walmart's using more robots — but says they'll actually extend warehouse workers' careers

• Warehouse work is physically taxing, with employees moving thousands of pounds per day.
• As Walmart automates distribution centers, new robots and forklifts are lightening the load.

As AI and automation continue to reshape the way we work, one major area of disruption is in the warehouses that are the backbone of modern retail.

Understandably, many warehouse workers are nervous about the future of their careers — and whether robots are going to take their jobs. Globally, more than 40% of warehouse workers in a survey by Accenture in 2022 published in the Harvard Business Review expressed "negative sentiment" about automation causing them to lose their roles.

But in Walmart's US warehouses at least, the retail giant says robots aren't shortening workers' careers — they're actually giving people more time on the job.

It's no secret that warehouse work is one of the most physically taxing roles in the digital age.

"You take a distribution center today, one of our associates is walking up to 10 miles a day, lifting thousands of pounds, moving pallets and things like that," Walmart CFO John David Rainey said Tuesday at Bank of America's London Investor Conference.

And all that distance and weight adds up over the course of a person's career, potentially forcing them to leave the workforce earlier than they might otherwise prefer.

Walmart typically employs about 1,000 workers at each of its 42 regional distribution centers, which are sprawling warehouses of up to 1.5 million square feet that support its 4,600 US stores.

Walmart is now adding automation to that fleet of facilities, and though some workers may worry about losing their jobs to machines, Rainey says retrieval robots and forklifts are actually lightening the load in a meaningful way.

"The feedback that we get from many of our associates is that we add as much as 10 years to their career because of the less manual-intensive nature of this work," he said.

Now, instead of a worker jogging a 5K before lunch, picking orders across 26 football fields worth of shelves, a robot can make the trip.

Not only that, the retrieval robots learn how to navigate the route more efficiently, saving time on the next loop, Rainey said.

Taken together, these automations are driving a fourfold increase in how much stuff a distribution center can process with the same number of workers, Rainey said previously.

That's helping Walmart vastly expand its business without adding so many new positions. That's financially a boon for Walmart and possibly welcome news for current employees — though possibly not for people trying to get a warehouse job there in the future.

"They're planning to add $130 billion of sales over the next five years on a flat head count," Jefferies analyst Corey Tarlowe previously told Business Insider. "AI and automation are going to be absolutely critical to their evolution."

Walmart's situation closely resembles that of Amazon, which has doubled the number of robots deployed in its fulfillment centers and warehouses in the last three years, including a humanoid robot named Digit.

Walmart's Rainey would likely agree with Amazon's director of global robotics, Stefano La Rovere, who told CNBC that "robots and technology help our employees … by reducing walking distance between assignments, by taking away repetitive motions, or helping them to lift heavy weights."

"That's something that we're very focused on," Rainey said, "doing this automation in a very associate-friendly way that becomes a complement to what they're doing and actually enhances their overall job experience."

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