The long-held fear that AI and robotics will entirely replace human workers may be hitting a wall of practical reality. Today’s cutting-edge of automation isn’t replacing the whole human but absorbing their most mundane tasks.
That is the consensus from Dave Bozeman, chief executive of third-party logistics giant C.H. Robinson, and Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Agility Robotics, speaking Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colorado. While both executives acknowledged deep societal anxiety around job displacement, they argued that the immediate future belongs to so-called task augmentation, allowing humans to move higher up the value chain.
“We will have humans doing contact with customers, solving customers problems, and going up the value stack to really get their minds to work,” Bozeman said. “Agents are doing a lot of that upfront work.”
C.H. Robinson has rebuilt itself as a tech organization serving logistics, Bozeman said. It relies on an in-house team of 450 software engineers and data scientists to build bespoke tools. The pivot from legacy machine learning to generative AI has yielded a fleet of more than 30 specialized AI agents that executed millions of shipping tasks over the past year.
Bozeman said C.H. Robinson has “gotten it swagger back” by embracing AI. He pointed to a coding agent the company has for transactional quoting. Human employees, he said, previously took up to 20 minutes to handle only 60% of quotes. The agent now handles 100% of quotes in around 30 seconds and does so at all times of the day.
Wall Street has rewarded C.H. Robinson for its high-tech transformation. Its stock is up more than 100% in the past year. But Bozeman insisted this isn’t tied to mass layoffs. Instead, he said automation is targeting entry-level operational roles that historically suffer from high turnover rates.
Yet fears of job loss are grounded in action by the country’s largest companies. Amazon, for one, has been reported to be planning to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. The company has also been at the center of AI-tied job cuts among its corporate staff, a trend that has surfaced at many U.S. employers.
Johnson, meanwhile, said Agility is emphasizing safety when it comes to its 150-plus pound walking machines. By the end of this year, Agility’s humanoids will be able to walk safely among humans, she said. Agility has many competitors, including Tesla and Figure AI, but the company has benefited from large partners like Amazon, which has tested its Digit robot on its warehouse floors.
Discussing why a humanoid form factor is better than a simpler wheeled robot, Johnson said the reality of existing supply chain infrastructure requires it. Manufacturing and production environments are built for humans, featuring stairs, tight corners, and waist-high counters. Wheeled robots are useful in open spaces, but they become “tippy” when lifting heavy objects, she said.
She also noted the deployment of humanoids may aid a U.S. labor shortage. Its humanoid is designed to step into the roles people actively avoid, she said.
“If that’s part of someone’s job, they say ‘that’s a part I don’t like doing,’ ” she said. “It’s repetitive. It’s mind-numbing. It’s injury-prone.”
More from the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference:
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