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Indiana University is proving how higher education can create solutions with industry. We're working side by side with industry.
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Partners to fuel economic growth that powers a future ready workforce. Explore IU's impact at iu.edu impact.
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio news. Hey, one of the things that we love to talk about. Robotics, Technology, automation. Bloomberg Weekend recently reported out that humanoid robots are coming as soon as they learn to fold clothes. Count me in.
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Okay. Okay.
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Why they wrote this? Apparently they the team attended a recent Silicon Valley summit and there they saw small robots roaming and pouring lattes while evangelists hailed new AI techniques as transformative. But full size prototypes. They're pretty scarce.
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Okay, I want to see what Ty Brady has to say about this. He's chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. Tai is also founding partner of Mass Robotics. It's a not for profit organization that's become the world's largest robotics innovation center and serves on a number of boards to promote STEM learning and advancement. Ty, good to have you back on the program. Happy holidays. I want to get to this idea of humanoid robots because it doesn't matter if a humanoid robot can fold laundry for a lot of the purposes that you have for Amazon. How are robots, apart from the Kiva robots, used right now in Amazon Warehouses?
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Well, thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me on. Carol, nice to hear you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the show and talk all things robotics and tech with you. Indeed, the age of physical AI is here. Amazon is building our physical AI systems to help better the customer experience, expanding our selection, lowering cost, fueling the faster delivery times that we know our customers love. But given your question, think of the very practical everyday experience where we're doing this at a very high reliability and scaling this, where we're shipping millions and millions of products every day here for the holiday season. It's really exciting to see and it's very real, it's very practical, and it's something that we're very proud of in what we're doing with our employees.
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All right, we wanna talk about this. You know, we do and we will. But I do wanna pick your brains. Cause I always feel like I learned so much. You know, when you join us, bring it, bring it. Is that so these humanoid robots, I mean, Elon's working on them, Other people are like, is it years away? What's your thought, your expertise? You know this world.
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I do know this world. I'll tell you that. We usually start with what problem are we trying to solve? What's the problem? We're trying to sol. Once we figure out the problem, then we actually go to functions. What functions should the robotics should the physical AI systems do? Right, so from the functionality, should it fold laundry, should it do your dishes? Then we derive form. And you kind of get the cart ahead of the horse when you start with form first and then see how can you apply this technology. And we don't do technology for technology's sake. Inside Amazon, what we do is we solve problems. We solve problems, everyday problems, and at an incredible scale that actually advances the state of the art in robotics. Right. So if you wanted a robot to wash your dishes, well, congratulations, you have that. You don't necessarily need a humanoid form to wash your dishes. As a matter of fact, it'd be kind of comical to see a robot pick up the dish, pick up a sponge, put the soap on it, scrub the dish, and put it in the drying rack. When you have this really practical robot in your kitchen today called the dishwasher, which is amazing, it blends right into the woodwork. So we think about function first and then allow the form to follow.
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Okay, so we want to talk specifics here about what's happening in the warehouses. Blue J and Aluna and more. Your systems, Blue Jay Robotics, Luna Agentic AI delivery glasses, Amazon's warehouses. These are well known for robotics in the use of tech and AI. How does all of that continue to evolve and specifically impact productivity side by side with human work?
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Absolutely. Yeah. We. So the word I want to use is supercharged. We're supercharging the world's largest fleet of robotics out there with AI, using AI systems to better the reasoning and to better assist our employees. Right. We want to eliminate the menial, the mundane, and the repetitive through the use of robotics as a tool set for employees. And we're entering this era where foundation models are making our robots smarter, more affordable, more adaptable, more conversational and really reshaping work as we know it. Not just in E commerce, but actually across industries and creating new kinds of jobs.
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Ty, I'm jumping in because right now we're showing, for those who are watching on TV and YouTube and our streaming service looks like your special delivery glasses. As we continue to show this. Just tell us what they're all about. They look like normal glasses, but what do they enable a driver to do more easily?
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Yeah, well, it's the fundamental principle that we have is to use them as a tool set. So allow the driver to understand where the delivery should be. Allow them to be kind of hands free. In order to take the picture of the package at your door. Allow them to understand what's the best route to the customer's door. Allow them to see their delivery notes of where they should place that the delivery at the right spot. That's just right for our customer. I mean we're customer obsessed. So any tool that we can give our delivery employees or our frontline employees, that's what, that's how we want to use technology.
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Are they rolled out?
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I think we're still in the early stages of deployment.
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So when would they be fully rolled out across the network?
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Hard to tell.
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Would it be within a year? Maybe within 2026?
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Yeah, we're pretty. We are a pretty. But once we get to the alpha and beta deployment, it's typically within about a year that you'll see this starting to roll out. And we take a very measured approach when things roll out. We test it, we make sure it's great for our employees. Does it add value for our employees? Does it create a safer environment for our employees? And then we'll test that at a smaller scale and then we go into the, you know, the millions and millions of scale.
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Hey, I want to go back to Blue Jay and Aluna. Tim brought up Blue Jay, your next generation robotic systems system. Excuse me, and Alun, an agentic AI system. So talk to us about that. How much are they deployed today across your fulfillment network? And I'm curious about milestones that we should all be watching out for in the next 12 to 24 months. Ty.
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Sure. So at Luna we're actually using kind of in a monitor, in a monitor only manner right now during peak. Right. We actually just just went through the peak of peaks where we have our largest outbound happening just actually yesterday. And what Illuna does is it gives operators a complete real time view to help guide their every move. Right. So think of many, many dashboards now can be consolidated into human consumable text, human consumable recommendations of how to actually deploy the network and how to deploy various robotics inside that building in a way that it gains these more efficiencies. So we're seeing that that is rolling out today. And then we're really excited about Blue Jay as well. You can think really for our sub same day network, that's a growing network they have inside of Amazon where we're getting the goods right to the customer's door in a matter of hours. What Bluejay does is it really indexes on a smaller footprint. You can think of this as three assembly lines kind of combined into one, where we have robotic arms picking orders for our customers out of our containerized storage systems and allowing those to be delivered right to the customer's door. That's really an exciting time.
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So if we think about this time right now, the holiday peak, where people are trying to get stuff as quick as possible, specifically, where did this. Where does the tech that you just outlined have the biggest impact? Is it smoothing labor variability, preventing bottlenecks? Does it improve on time delivery metrics? Is it all of the above? Is it something I didn't even mention?
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Yeah, it is all the above. Plus what it's allowing us to do is really exception handling, right? When we think about robotics and you think robotics and physical AI at SC, when you ship millions and millions every day, just 1% of exception handling can kind of eat your lunch. So any tools that we have to help us with the exception handling, maybe one of the systems is not picking up a particular object, right? So that learning needs to be propagated through our other manipulation systems. Or maybe a mobility system is having some bottlenecks because of the way the inventory is stored inside of the building. People have really good skills of critical reasoning and critical thinking and using common sense. So tools that allow them to understand the situation better, perceive their environment better through the use of robotics, and then have truly physical agents to help with that, in concert with our employees is allowing us to deal with all the exceptions that we see, you know, every day, especially at peak.
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Hey, Ty, just got about a minute left here, and I know we've talked about this with you before, and I think it's a fair question. You guys have addressed it about the impact on your workforce. And I wonder if it's smarter to think about. Maybe not that what you guys are doing in terms of automation or other companies for that matter, that it means doing away with workers, but maybe it means that you will have to hire fewer workers in the future. Is that fair?
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Well, first of all, Carol, any question you ask is fair. So I think it is fair to always ask those questions. And we should always kind of, you know, have the mindset of people first and which we do inside of Amazon. So what are we doing specifically for our employees? And I'm really proud of this. We're building better machines for them. We're listening to them. We're iterating on our designs. We're rolling out a tool set for them to use it every day at scale, a scale that's almost unimaginable when it comes to what we've done inside of robotics. We're upskilling them. We have a $2.5 billion pledge that we call Future Ready to prepare 50 million people for how technology will impact and change not only the nature of work but also their everyday lives. And we're also creating a safer environment with our robotics, eliminating the repetitive, the menial, the mundane. Allowing machines to do the heavy lifting and the repetitive actions and allowing people to work with them in order to use this beautiful thing here. Now streaming. It's the new limited series. Little Disasters.
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Happy Families.
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Perfect Marriage. What happened?
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Social services have been called in.
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I've known you for 10 years.
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How could you make that call?
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These rich families. Concealing things seems to come naturally. Starring Diane Kruger. You can't take out children. And Joe Joyner.
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Parents can do some terrible things in moments of frustration.
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Little Disasters.
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All episodes now streaming on Paramount.
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Plus.