Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood stated that automation in the workplace is growing at a fast pace for Amazon, and robots may soon outnumber its human employees.
In a Squawk Box segment with CNBC, Wood said the multinational tech company is adding roughly a thousand robots a day which make up a third of its workforce and she believes that by 2030 Amazon will have more robots than employees.
“[We] are just at the dawn of the robotics age. And I would say artificial intelligence (AI) and battery technology are all a part of that movement as well,” she explained.
Based on her predictions, the rise of robots will go beyond Amazon, spreading across the manufacturing industry as technology advances and costs continue to drop, speeding up this process.
“If you look at the cost declines, which drive all our models... for every cumulative doubling in the number of robots produced, the cost declines are in the 50-60% range,” Wood shared.
Amazon is expected to release its fourth-quarter earnings this Thursday. In the past weeks, the company, along with tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, have taken part in a mass layoff due to cost-cutting efforts amid rising production costs, inflation and shifts into AI technology.
In a blog post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company would cut around 18,000 jobs as the company experienced difficulty with its annual planning.
Last November, the company also cut 10,000 jobs within the devices organization, retail division and human resources.