Amazon’s strategy for automation and workforce development could offer useful lessons for employers and policymakers navigating Europe’s next phase of industrial transformation.

At Delivering the Future in London, Amazon unveiled new robotics systems, AI-powered tools and workforce initiatives, underlining the scale of its ambitions in Europe by announcing plans to invest more than €10 billion in its European fulfilment network and create 25,000 jobs across the region over the coming years.

In conversation with Euronews, Amazon executives described Europe not only as a testing ground for emerging technologies, but as a proving ground for new approaches to workforce transition – one that could help inform wider conversations about Europe’s economic competitiveness and the future of work.

Technology and people ‘work together’

Debates around automation often focus on jobs that could disappear. Amazon argues that the more useful question for employers and policymakers is not whether automation happens, but how workers are included in shaping its rollout.