If you opt to do your holiday shopping on Amazon.com, odds are good that the merchandise you order will be plucked from a shelf by a human: The Seattle e-commerce giant is adding 70,000 seasonal workers in its distribution centers for the Christmas crunch.
But Amazon is also beginning to add Massachusetts-made robots. In October, the company divulged for the first time that it has deployed more than 1,300 robotic warehouse workers from Kiva Systems in North Reading, a company Amazon bought last year for $775 million. And Kiva’s squat orange robots, which move racks of merchandise to workers who fill boxes, could prove essential to helping Amazon return to profitability. In 2012, Amazon lost $39 million, and it lost $41 million in the most recent quarter.
When Amazon bought Kiva, “I believed that it was an awful lot about Amazon solving its inefficiency problems,” says Jim Baum, former chief executive of Symbotic, a warehouse robotics company in Wilmington. “They thought Kiva’s technology could have an impact.”
But as Kiva ramps up production of its robotic systems for its new parent the number on order from Amazon may be as high as 18,000, according to one trade publication, and could be higher according to my sources the big question is what happens to Kiva’s early customers. Major retailers such as Staples, Walgreens, Gap, Office Depot, and Crate & Barrel installed Kiva’s technology in their warehouses. And now they all must grapple not only with possible shortages of Kiva bots, but also whether they want to do business with a direct competitor.