Chris Isidore of CNN Money, wrote on July 29 about Amazon’s announcement to hire 7,000 new employees, 5,000 of which are for their nationwide distribution centers in an article titled Amazon hiring 7,000 workers.  Last week, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Robotics & Automation Society (IEEE-RAS) held a briefing for the Robotics Caucus on Robots & Job Creation.  Read further to understand how Amazon’s hiring and the briefing are related.

Raj Madhavan , Vice President of the Industrial Activities Board of IEEE-RAS, opened the session by asking questions on how best to use robotics.  He then turned the microphone over to Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).  Jeff spoke about the importance of robots in the U.S. for global competitiveness.  He highlighted the fact that every new job in manufacturing generates 1.3 jobs in support functions.  Mitchell Weiss, the Chief Operating Officer of Seegrid, followed by highlighting that robots enable new industries.  As an example, Amazon is using Kiva Robots in their distribution centers, as described in this Forbes article.  The improved efficiency in the distribution centers is enabling Amazon to deliver goods faster, sometimes even the same day as ordered.  This in turn, is why Amazon needs more distribution centers with more employees.  The session concluded with David Bourne, Director of the Rapid Manufacturing Lab at Carnegie Mellon University discussing ways in which robots enable people to work more efficiently by using augmented reality.

The slides from all of the presentations can be found here.