Two Sides of the Automated Productivity Coin

Francis Scialabba

Last week we saw how the top dogs in retail are pairing automation and worker productivity.

Retail done “intelligently”

Thursday, Walmart unveiled its Levittown, NY, “store of the future,” which houses its Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL for short). It features...

• Ceiling-mounted, AI-powered cameras that can identify products, judge existing inventory against predicted future demand, and notify associates when shelves need to be restocked
• Movement-tracking educational displays that imaginatively depict shoppers walking by
• A big on-site data center to power the whole shebang

Fulfillment done...unflatteringly

Amazon found itself in the PR hot seat with a less glamorous example of automation in the workplace. Thursday, The Verge reported Amazon uses a warehouse “system” that tracks individual worker productivity and automatically generates warnings for subpar performance.

• It’s a tech twist to the criticism that Amazon treats its warehouse workers poorly.
• Sometimes, warnings are just the start. At a Baltimore facility using the system, about 300 associates got the axe in a period of about a year for not hitting productivity goals.

The dual strategies

Walmart: Wage a public show-and-tell campaign embracing tech-forward concepts.

• How it plays: With its massive brick-and-mortar presence, Walmart’s inviting customers to vet its claim that tech won’t replace workers but instead boost their productivity.

Amazon: Lacking Walmart’s physical footprint but dominating the ether, build an “out of sight, out of mind” back-end logistics and fulfillment network.

• How it plays: For efficiency and the bottom line, well. But automated employee benchmarking when everyone’s worried robots will take their jobs? Not well.

Keep in mind: For now, Walmart’s business and PR stars are aligned. It’s pairing employees with tech to increase productivity and offset rising labor costs. But in the case of future belt-tightening, that could change. As for Amazon, its promise of one-day shipping and seamless online shopping shows it’s a techno-utopian, too. But only in the eyes of the customer...not the warehouse worker.