Insights from Head of Coaching

Dear Students,
 

More good news on the Human/AI front this week!
 

Despite the level of efficiency needed to coordinate management of Amazon’s 400M+ individual items – and 1.6M packages (reportedly 66K/hour and 18.5/second) shipped daily, the $575B+ behemoth has not yet gone “completely-AI based” within its warehouses. As reported by Liz Young, who specializes in logistics and supply chain for the Wall Street Journal, the 30-year-old company’s newest 3M-square-foot building in Shreveport, LA “…is the first warehouse to use automation and artificial intelligence at every step of the fulfillment process.”

Young notes, however, that “Some traditional warehouse roles have proved too difficult to automate”...partly due to the wide variation in the company’s products, which also range in “size, weight and fragility, from dog toys to toaster ovens.”  Warehouse Automation Sector Research Manager Rueben Scriven of Interact Analysis explains it this way: “‘If you don’t know what items you’re going to be handling, it makes it very difficult to create an automated system that’s flexible enough to handle the various items.”‘ Accordingly, there appears to be a key role for “real people” (which could very well be fellow students of yours), as “Humans can easily look into a storage container packed full of goods, identify a particular item, and know how to pick it up and handle it, whether it is a bottle or shampoo or a sweater.”

Tye Brady, Chief Technologist at Amazon Robotics, shares the “picture that’s worth the 1,000 words” behind Scriven’s statement, in affirming that “the tactile grasp that the human hand has, and the situational awareness and the perception of the human brain, is unmatched.” (Should we consider these to be new power skills, perhaps?)

Admittedly, ambitious international students like you may wonder why this “grasping” process should matter to you, since few of you are likely to plan to launch your careers in warehouses. However, we would argue that the situation just described is also a metaphor for additional ways that humans – like you and your friends – will continue to meaningfully contribute within AI-driven environments. It’s all about mindset – curiosity, adaptability, problem-solving and initiative, precipitated by your self-awareness, analytical skills and critical thinking, applied toward assessing where, when and in which ways you could potentially add value that might not have been realized to date.
 

What’s more, per Brady’s projection, as Amazon warehouses become more productive, “…we have more throughput, and we also generate more exceptions.” Simply put, (in our humble opinion), the more complexity that enters the global commercial arena, the more human judgment (like yours!) will be needed, and arguably in ways we haven’t even fully determined yet.
 

How can you leverage your human – yet not automated – “power” skills this evening?
 

Best,
 

Amy-Louise