AI Resilience Report forStockers and Order Fillers

If you've ever wondered whether the people who stock shelves and pack online orders are being replaced by robots, the honest answer is: some of the work is changing, but humans are still very much needed. Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner said at the National Retail Federation's 2026 Big Show that automation is shifting jobs so that workers "were doing really physical jobs, and now they're bot techs," helping people "work with their head more than their back." At the same conference, executives stressed that they're "looking at AI really as a productivity tool more than a replacement of personnel." Inside Amazon, though, the change is more dramatic — the company has deployed over a million warehouse robots like Sequoia, Sparrow, and Proteus ^[1] that handle stowing, picking, and transporting goods, with leaked internal plans aiming to replace as many as 600,000 jobs by 2033. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects stockers and order fillers will grow by 8% (about 235,000 jobs) from 2024 to 2034 ^[2], because buy-online-pickup-in-store keeps creating new picking work even as self-checkout reduces cashier tasks.

Adoption is accelerating fast because the tech is suddenly affordable. A 2025 MHI study found 48% of organizations were using robots in plants or warehouses in 2025, up from 23% three years earlier, helped by subscription-based "robotics-as-a-service" plans that let smaller companies skip huge upfront costs. The NRF reports that Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, with retailers pouring money into inventory and supply-chain automation.

Still, the World Economic Forum estimates AI may eliminate 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones ^[3] — a net gain that depends on workers learning new skills. Human strengths like judgment, customer service, troubleshooting broken robots, and handling unusual items are exactly the abilities employers still pay for, so leaning into those skills is a smart move.