In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta. She suffered a concussion as a result, and was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her.
Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated her need to work more slowly, it took over a month for Watson to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she wasn’t provided the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant and could not easily connect with a human employee in HR.
In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had to sit down with her manager for what Amazon calls a “documented coaching session.” Just weeks later, she was reprimanded again—this time for working too slowly, which her doctor had said was necessary following her head injury.
“I told my operations manager: ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’” Watson recounts. “I thought that everyone thought I should go more slowly because I’m recovering. And he was like, ‘This is not our choice. This is Amazon.’”
Over the past four years, Watson says automation has slowly changed how workers like her communicate with the HR department and raise issues on the job. (When reached by Fast Company, an Amazon spokesperson said, “Our employees have multiple ways to get support—from on-site HR and managers to digital tools that can help answer questions quickly. For something as important as a medical accommodation, we work directly with each person to make sure they get what they need.”)
In December, the worker advocacy nonprofit United for Respect surveyed Amazon and Walmart workers to better understand how AI and automation are changing the nature of their work. The findings were not entirely unexpected: Job displacement is, as always, a major source of stress for retail and warehouse workers at both companies. Out of more than 200 respondents, 60% said they’re worried about AI eliminating their jobs within the next year or two, and 49% cited losing their job to a robot as one of their top-three fears amid growing AI usage in the workplace.
But a surprising number of workers—62%—expressed being most concerned with how HR decisions are increasingly being outsourced to automated systems.
“I think it really does speak to the nature of how technology is getting implemented in the retail setting, and specifically how Amazon and Walmart are deploying AI in their workplaces,” says Bianca Agustin, co-executive director of United for Respect.
Amazon has not been shy about its investment in robotics technology, which is already transforming its warehouses; as the company continues adding robots and automation, Amazon reportedly will be able to cut back on hiring hundreds of thousands of workers in just the next few years. (Amazon has previously disputed these claims to Fast Company, arguing they do not “accurately reflect” the company’s hiring plans.)
Walmart, on the other hand, has talked about its strategy to streamline its AI agents, deploying “super agents” focused on four areas: customers, employees, engineers, and suppliers. Walmart is said to have even changed its approach to compensation for retail staff and front-line workers, no longer offering standardized raises based on years of service. Instead, Walmart now looks at a number of performance-related factors, from attendance to overall store performance—and, according to Agustin, the company is using algorithms to determine those raises.
In its statement to Fast Company, Amazon said United for Respect’s survey “doesn’t come close to representing the voices of our 1.5 million employees worldwide. What we actually hear from our workforce is that robotics and AI are making their jobs safer, less physically demanding, and more interesting—and that’s what we’re focused on.”
Walmart referred to its proxy statement and noted that the company has been “open and proactive in discussing how AI and automation are transforming” its business, including its workforce.
United for Respect’s survey reveals that both companies have started automating their HR functions in ways that are already being felt by employees. At Amazon, for example, workers like Watson now largely communicate with HR through an AI assistant, rather than speaking directly with HR managers who are on-site at the warehouse.
As this shift has taken place, many workers seem to long for more human connection. In fact, 56% of the Amazon and Walmart workers surveyed said they’re worried that the uptick in AI usage is resulting in less contact with managers and coworkers. “Workers [reported] a feeling of loss of human interaction in the workplace,” Agustin says. “Everything is mediated by your app or by a computer that’s sitting in the middle of the warehouse.”
About 54% of the workers surveyed also noted that AI adoption has led to staffing reductions—in line with a broader upheaval happening across workplaces, as tech companies slash head count alongside considerable investments in AI.
“Lots of associates at both companies talked about understaffing and feeling like it was worse now that the companies are using AI to schedule,” Agustin says.
One Walmart associate named Ava—who asked to use only her first name to protect her identity—says the company is using AI for task management and to determine how long each task should take. The time frames that the modular planning tool comes up with, she says, are often unrealistic. Ava’s job involves setting up and restocking shelves at a Walmart store, which usually also entails cleaning and sanitizing the shelves and checking for any expired products. But the speed with which she is now required to work has made it difficult to be as thorough.
“Now that we’ve gone to digital tags and a computer-generated time frame on these [modules], we’ve had to skip critical steps,” she says.
The company’s embrace of automation has also made it more difficult for new employees to be trained adequately, according to Ava, which she says is leading to greater turnover and staffing issues. “When a new person is brought on to the job, we used to get hands-on training on the floor,” she says. “Now everything is done in front of a computer, and you’re tossed out on the floor.”
Over the years, United for Respect has filed shareholder proposals over a number of labor and safety issues at Amazon and Walmart. Now the organization is more explicitly turning its attention to how AI is reshaping jobs at those companies.
United for Respect recently filed the first shareholder proposal asking Walmart to provide more insight into how AI and automation is impacting its workforce. (In its proxy statement, Walmart’s board urged shareholders to vote against the proposal, arguing that any additional reporting is “unnecessary given our extensive existing disclosures, robust governance practices, and continued commitment to appropriate transparency in this rapidly evolving area.”)
“We wanted to give a platform to workers to begin to engage with investors who really haven’t thought about this yet,” Agustin says. “I think people weren’t that surprised that Amazon is going all in on AI, given tech has always been at the core of their business model. That really hasn’t been true for Walmart. . . . We wanted to make sure people were aware that this was happening.”
As for Amazon, United for Respect had initially filed a proposal with 30 other shareholders. But Amazon excluded the proposal from its proxy statement by taking advantage of a Securities and Exchange Commission loophole that allows companies to do so without justification. United for Respect has now filed a floor proposal instead, to be considered at Amazon’s upcoming shareholder meeting. The proposal calls for the creation of an AI advisory board comprised of front-line workers, as well as a variety of independent experts.
The goal of these proposals is to shed light on how workers are already being affected by automated decisions—and could be in the future—as AI redefines every aspect of business operations at companies like Amazon and Walmart.
“I’ve been talking to lawyers and policy folks who are starting to really think about: How do we need to revamp our existing frameworks to actually protect workers from automated decision-making?” Agustin says. “Because if it can just be something employers can hide behind, this is going to be a crisis for workers.”