As part of our annual UCLA Anderson Easton Technology Management Center Innovate Conference, I had the distinct honor of sitting down with Anderson alumna, Gail Carpenter (’98), CFO/VP Finance -Amazon Worldwide Amazon Stores to discuss her role at Amazon and the work they’re doing to incorporate AI and robotics, and the positive impact on customers, transportation and logistics. --better customer experience and lower costs!
I'm, I'm kind of partial to robotics and so I would go back to, you know, some of the speakers this morning and talked about the intersection of AI and the physical world. And when I look at what our robotics teams are doing, it's just really exciting. So he launched this fulfillment center back in September. It's in Shreveport, LA, and it is the largest integration of AI, robotics and automation. In Amazon's history. It is. It's going to allow us to be faster and more productive. It will allow us to get products and orders to to customers faster. It also will create 2500 jobs in the area in which it sits. And because there are so many advanced technologies present in the building, it will create 30% more technical roles than we've had in our previous fulfillment centers. And one of the reasons I really love robotics is that I feel like it punches above its weight. So yes, it it makes us more productive. It makes us faster to get things out. The customers, but it also makes us safer because we're really focusing on keeping our workers injury free and a lot of times that means keeping them working in their power zone. You know, they're not having the lift heavy things up from the floor over their heads. They can work in their power zone and the and the robots do all of the work around the periphery. So you know, we we have reduced our safety incidents by 30% over the last. Just handful of years.
