After it was unveiled earlier this week that Walmart will be adding thousands of robots to its workforce, the company is quick to reassure critics that the bots will make human employees happy.
According to Vox, Walmart will have 1,500 autonomous floor-cleaning robots, 300 shelf-scanning robots to check inventory, 1,200 delivery-sorting robots to collaborate with the shelf-scanning robots and 900 automated "pickup towers" for online orders. The technology will free up human employees time from focusing on tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual. Now, employees will have more time to focus on selling merchandise and serving customers.
It will take a significant amount of time to have the machines be fully capable of jobs that were once mundane to humans. Still, Walmart is already an industry leader when it comes to replacing human workers with automation, for example: self-checkout, which reportedly helps cut costs.
