At the time, employees in Amazon’s retail management division spent their days making deals and working out product promotions as well as determining what items to stock in its warehouses, in what quantities, and for what price. The animating idea behind Hands off the Wheel originated at Amazon’s South Lake Union office towers, where the company began automating work in the mid-2010s under an initiative some called Project Yoda. As companies look at how to integrate increasingly powerful AI capabilities into their businesses, they’d do well to consider this example. The strategy appears to have paid off: At a time when it’s possible to start new businesses faster and cheaper than ever before, Hands off the Wheel has kept Amazon operating nimbly, propelled it ahead of its competitors, and shown that automating in order to fire can mean missing big opportunities. The purpose was not to eliminate jobs but to automate tasks so that the company could reassign people to build new products - to do more with the people on staff, rather than doing the same with fewer people. After one short interaction, it was clear that some have it completely wrong.įor the past decade, Amazon has been pushing to automate office work under a program now known as Hands off the Wheel.
I was at the conference because after spending months researching how Amazon automates work at its headquarters, I was eager to learn how other firms thought about this powerful technology. At an automation conference in late 2018, a high-ranking banking official looked up from his buffet plate and stated his objective without hesitation: I’m here, he told me, to eliminate full-time employees.
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