Ecommerce giant Amazon has revealed that its fastest delivery last year, from clicking buy to the parcel arriving with the consumer, was only 75 minutes.
John Boumphry, UK country manager for Amazon, told the audience at Retail Week’s Live event, that this quick delivery was due to its well-established delivery network, technology adoption and customer-focused strategy.
He explained: “While that delivery was accomplished with things that all of us would recognise – a warehouse, a driver, a van – each step of that end-to-end process has been refined and optimised over 25 years of operation. It was thanks to teams thinking really hard about how they can improve their individual part of the customer experience.
“That has led us to building a highly efficient network to put the products that people want as close to them as possible, improving speed, cost, efficiency, while also being better for the environment.”
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Boumphry also stressed that Amazon’s adoption of robotic technology over the last decade has created more jobs, the reverse of many concerns. He explained that while Amazon has rolled out 500,000 robots, this in turn has created one million roles, as well as providing upskilling opportunities.
“As well as transforming existing warehouse jobs, robotics create new jobs and these are highly skilled roles. The fear suggested by someone who started down this path was that robotics would replace people. In fact, the opposite has happened,” he noted.
“Robots have enhanced the lives of workers, not replaced them, and I’m confident that in a few years’ time we’ll be able to say the same thing about the impact of generative AI.”
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