This story appeared in the December 2025 issue of Modern Materials Handling.
What’s Related
In a world obsessed by automation and AI, it’s a little too easy to overlook people in the warehouse. But not here, today. Instead, we’re going to force the issue.
You see, lots of people work in warehouses. More than 1.83 million as of August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from 628,000 in 2010, which was noticeably higher than the 510,000 in 2000.
Depending on your viewpoint, that’s quite a positive or negative trajectory. In either case, it’s the other side of the industrial employment coin from manufacturing.
As people in warehousing has spiraled upward, the number of people in manufacturing has declined precipitously. In the 1990s, the number of people in manufacturing was just under 20 million. By August of this year, that number was just 12.7 million people in manufacturing, according to the BLS.
Certainly an interesting contrast between the two. But there’s not enough bandwidth in this single article to dig into that. So, we’ll just focus on warehousing for now.
While total numbers are up, most anyone will tell you that they can’t find enough people. Odd, but true. Why is that?
Quite simply, the warehouse workforce profile, both individually and by job function, is very, very different today. Just ask Chris Steiner, senior vice president of product management at Dematic.
Steiner says the average time for an individual to remain in a single warehouse today is less than two years. Go back to 2005 or so, and Steiner says the average tenure exceeded 10 years. (While anecdotal, these are powerful figures, even if Steiner is off by 50%, which he’s not.)
Why such a change? Steiner attributes the shift to changing work conditions, hours, the importance of flexibility, and the ability to advance. Pollster Gallup agrees. This October, Gallup asked people if warehouse work is a quality job. In fact, warehousing as a job was at the bottom of the list as a quality job.
Nothing new here
Twenty years ago at a supply chain meeting, people (who did not work in warehouses) were asked who wanted their children to go into warehouse work. No hands went up.
If warehouse work is so tough and out of favor, do people in the warehouse still matter? Yes. That is, if you want your stuff inventoried, picked, or shipped any time soon.
Clearly, something has to change. And that transition is already underway (perhaps glacially underway but underway nonetheless), says Andres Boullosa, Zebra Technology’s global director of strategy, warehouse vertical.
“As frontline workers move away from manual, repetitive, dangerous or physically demanding tasks, warehouse workers are transitioning to higher-level work,” says Boullosa. That’s a fundamental positive for people in warehouses.
With that said, we talked to Steiner, Boullosa and other experts about what’s going on here now and in the near future. Here’s what they had to say.
The windup
Bryan Jensen was unequivocal when asked if people have a future in the warehouse.
“We will always need people in the warehouse. In a few years, we may only have half the number of people but throughput will be four times what it is today,” says Jensen, chairperson and executive vice president at consultant St. Onge.
Lee Rector, CEO of LaborAI, sees this shift as the outcome of balancing people, automation, software and AI in managing warehouse activities.
Rector talks about systems able to pre-determine labor needs today at various times and specific areas in the warehouse. And then being able to rebalance all of that tomorrow based on the new day’s demand.
“Changes in who does what in the warehouse and when will depend on adoption of technology and those technologies’ abilities to make decisions independent of people,” explains Dematic’s Steiner.
Bill Atherton at FORTNA puts this quite simply. “Warehouse success now and for the foreseeable future is about the ability to be flexible,” he says. But that flexibility comes at a cost, FORTNA’s senior director of integrated product development observes.
Atherton talks about the business case for people and technology in the warehouse. “What is the ROI for the automation package? The answer is critical. And only when it’s favorable will that balance of people versus automation change,” he adds.
Consider this, says Atherton: “You start with a manual cart. Then you move to a pick-to-light smart cart. Then an autonomous mobile robot replaces the cart. The next stage could be a cobot that works directly with people. The business case for each stage will make the decision every time.”
Which brings us back to two points made by Jensen time and again.
First of all, what are you willing to pay people? “All too often when a warehouse manager says there aren’t enough people out there, the reality is that the wages offered are not high enough.”
Second of all, what type of a warehouse are you talking about, asks Jensen. “Not every warehouse is a candidate for much, if any, technology. There are lots of factors here. And nothing is universal. So don’t get fooled into thinking there’s only one people equation,” adds Jensen.
The pitch
So, what do you do? That all depends.
You may have seen The New York Times piece about the future of Amazon’s warehouse workforce. It was not bashful.
“Documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75% of its operations,” the article said.
That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon won’t need to hire, wrote the Times.
And to Jensen’s point earlier, it continued on to say: “Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. workforce in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033.”
The day after this article appeared, Amazon announced a new robotics system able to pick, sort and consolidate packages. And to make it appear less threatening to people, Amazon calls the system Blue Jay. Don’t know what to make of the name, but there it is.
Clearly, Amazon is an outlier in the warehouse workforce story. But there does have to be a cutting edge here, and we have just met part of it. And when you hear financial journalists say all such robots are in the future, not now, realize they have it all wrong.
Here’s one other quick note to make about autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), the most favored of automation types to change what people do. Their ability to reduce how much people walk is top of the list of what they bring to the warehouse.
Not far behind is their ability to assist picking. But there are limitations here. As a Wall Street Journal headline said in October, “How does a robot pick an apple? Not very well.”
And while that’s an agricultural reference, it probably doesn’t have even a single degree of separation from picking in a warehouse. In other words, automation, and especially robots, are still very much technologies in development. They may be moving ahead at breakneck speed, but are still very much in development.
The other major player will be AI. “Leaders want to invest in AI,” says Zebra’s Boullosa. “What they have to figure out is where AI will do them the most good.”
Depending on the facility, there is more than enough opportunity. The range is, well, just about anything you want.
A year ago, Modern did an article on AI development by materials handling suppliers. The focus included: stock level management, item picking, pick load buffers and general data analysis.
Over at LaborAI, Rector focuses on workflow. Actually, it would be better to say integrated workflow.
Rector talks about linking warehouse execution systems (WES), warehouse control systems (WCS) and even warehouse management systems (WMS) with wearables and other devices directing worker activities. Best of all, AI is the engine here, but well behind the scenes without workers having to learn AI per se.
And please remember, we are in the very early stages of AI in the warehouse, and everywhere else, for that matter.
For instance, Pew Research did a general workforce survey of AI use by worker age group. The 18- to 29-year-olds may lead the pack, but came in only at 12% (see infographic above).
And while there are no such numbers for AI in the warehouse, you know for sure AI use is nowhere near the levels of the general workforce.
The delivery
All of which raises an interesting question: How are worker roles in the warehouse most likely to change near term?
While we got answers from our experts, it’s clear that this list is still very much up in the air. And what that means to the future of people in the warehouse, even more so.
It’s also worth noting that the rate of change is most likely, say the experts, to be gradual. No one is talking revolution here. The changing role of people in the warehouse will be fundamental over time, but it will not be here-today-gone-tomorrow.
Zebra’s Boullosa says changes will be “driven by intelligent automation, which is creating new job titles and demands for new skills, especially as it becomes critical to manage, interpret and optimize automated systems.
He continues to say, “whether an associate is overseeing the daily performance of an automated system or an IT associate training an AI system prior to implementation, warehouse associates are becoming more focused on delivering measurable business value.”
Rector of LaborAI foresees a downsizing of engineering staff. He also says that in three to five years, the inventory manager role will no longer exist. There will also be much less interest in floor-level supervisors who check orders. That will be redundant with AI, Rector says.
Rector expects to see a rise in directors of automation who will oversee both equipment and operations.
FORTNA’s Atherton sees much less need for people who do palletizing, truck loading and unloading, each picking, goods-to-person picking and even returns.
On the flip side, Atherton expects more robot trainers and maintenance technicians. “We have to remember that automation isn’t easy. And it takes people to make it work after the equipment supplier leaves the premises,” he says.
The list of disappearing roles, says Dematic’s Steiner, includes trailer loading/unloading, conveyor monitors and cycle counters. Maintenance technicians top his list of what will be important in the future alongside AI engineers and digital system supervisors.
Jensen of St. Onge looks more at functions than titles.
“Few functions are going away. But many will require less labor,” Jensen says. As to the future, “there will be an uplift in titles that support planning functionality. It’s all about sequencing the flow across the floor and optimized labor utilization at any given moment,” adds Jensen.
All of this is a positive for people in the warehouse, says Steiner.
He earlier talked about the shortened tenure of people. That said, he has high hopes for reversing that.
The cause will be changing roles as more people in the warehouse take on more desirable knowledge worker roles, many of which don’t yet exist. Wouldn’t that be a nice turn of events?
