Amazon’s Proteus Robot Can Now Take Orders in Plain English

Amazon added natural-language control to its Proteus warehouse robot at a June 4 event at its Dartford fulfillment center east of London, pairing the upgrade with a €10 billion ($11.6 billion) commitment to expand European fulfillment operations and a promise of 25,000 new jobs across the continent. The next-generation Proteus understands conversational instructions from workers with no programming interface needed, moves anywhere across fulfillment and delivery sites, and handles carts weighing close to 400 kilograms. European deployment is set for the first half of 2027.

Before workers could deploy the original Proteus, they needed technical expertise to program task assignments. The conversational upgrade removes that requirement, which matters most for the legacy European fulfillment sites Amazon is now targeting for its robotics expansion.

How Proteus Learned to Listen

From Dock to Floor

Amazon first introduced Proteus in 2022, a decade after its acquisition of Kiva Systems, the automated guided vehicle (AGV) maker whose technology seeded the company’s in-house robotics program. That original version was restricted to dock areas, moving heavy carts between loading zones so workers didn’t have to push loads close to 400 kilograms across long shifts. Sensors let it navigate around people without a dedicated track, something most fulfillment-center robots at the time couldn’t manage. By this spring, 25 U.S. fulfillment centers were running it.

The 2022 version ran a sensor suite that let it share space with workers without needing a dedicated lane. No other Amazon robot at the time had that capability. That coexistence design, built on the Kiva navigation architecture and years of in-house development, was what made Proteus deployable in active fulfillment areas alongside people.

The new version lifts the dock restriction entirely. It transports containers as they arrive at a site, moves them between workstations, and operates across both fulfillment centers and delivery stations. What had been a one-zone robot becomes a site-wide material handler, covering tasks that previously required different machines or manual labor at multiple points inside a building.

Talking to the Machine

The older Proteus needed programmed instructions. Assigning it a task meant technical commands or a dedicated software system, which required specialist expertise most shift managers don’t have. The next generation uses AI to accept plain conversational prompts. Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, described the result at Dartford:

You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing. It becomes your assistant for material movement.

Amazon has built most of its newest, most automated fulfillment centers in the United States over the past four years, facilities designed from the ground up to integrate robotics. Most European sites predate that generation of infrastructure. Retrofitting them requires robots that existing staff can operate without specialist onboarding. Amazon hasn’t published the specific AI architecture behind the natural-language capability, but the output it describes is a worker stating a task objective and the robot determining how to execute and sequence it independently.

STARK and Vulcan’s European Footprint

Two other systems are expanding across Europe as part of the same investment, each covering floor zones Proteus doesn’t reach.

STARK handles tote loading. Per The Robot Report’s technical coverage of the system, it uses a FANUC CRX-30iA force- and power-limited arm to pick full totes from conveyor belts and place them onto carts, repetitive heavy-lifting work that otherwise runs through a worker’s entire shift. The system originated as an Amazon operations employee’s suggestion to improve a process and reduce a physical safety risk. Amazon first piloted it in Barcelona, Spain, and plans to expand it to 15 European sites by 2027.

STARK’s employee-origin detail is a consistent thread in how Amazon presents its warehouse automation. The company frames the system as a tool workers helped conceive, built to address a problem they identified on the floor.

Vulcan is further along in European deployment. Amazon describes it as its first robot with a sense of touch, combining vision systems and tactile sensors to simultaneously see and feel objects in densely packed storage environments, which allows more accurate picking than a vision-only system. Developed for a facility in Spokane, Washington, Vulcan has expanded to Amazon’s Hamburg, Germany fulfillment center and is set to reach additional European locations.

Amazon has deployed more than 1 million robots across its global fulfillment network. Industrial robotics is scaling across manufacturing broadly: humanoid robots are entering automotive factory floors in Southeast Asia, with programs from newer manufacturers reaching commercial contracts this year.

Thirty Cents an Item

Amazon’s framing at Dartford led with employee support and customer service speed. The economic projections behind the push come from documents Amazon prepared for an internal audience.

The New York Times obtained Amazon strategy documents in October 2025 showing the company’s automation team had mapped out labor cost savings from robotics through 2033. Morgan Stanley analysts treated the figures as credible and revised their estimates of Amazon’s potential annual savings from automation accordingly.

• $12.6 billion in projected Amazon labor savings from automation, 2025 to 2027
• 160,000 U.S. warehouse hires potentially avoided by 2027, per the internal documents
• 600,000 positions not filled by 2033, even as product sales were projected to roughly double
• 30 cents saved per item shipped, the per-unit projection in the internal materials

Those figures covered U.S. operations. The European expansion extends the same automation logic to a region with stronger labor protections, denser union representation, and a workforce of roughly 230,000 Amazon direct employees within a broader ecosystem the company says supports 1.5 million European jobs.

The same leaked documents showed Amazon executives advising staff to avoid terms like “automation” and “AI” when discussing robot deployment, favoring “advanced technology” and “cobots” instead. The Dartford announcement used neither term prominently.

The robotics expansion is unfolding alongside a broader workforce restructuring. Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles in October 2025 and announced a further 16,000 corporate cuts in January 2026, citing plans to concentrate investment in its core technology priorities. Both rounds of cuts were in corporate positions, not warehouse operations, and the European fulfillment announcement sits in a separate workforce category from those reductions.

The 25,000 Jobs Commitment

Amazon led the Dartford announcement with a hiring pledge: 25,000 new European fulfillment jobs in the coming years, with a portion of those roles tied to the maintenance, engineering, and reliability work the new robots require.

The company committed $1 billion to its Career Choice employee upskilling program by 2030, offering funded education and training programs for current workers. John Boumphrey, Amazon’s UK country manager, told CNBC at the event that robots have “actually driven up employment rather than the reverse” at the company’s warehouses. Amazon has made this argument consistently: even as it has deployed more than 1 million robots globally, it has continued hiring and points to new technical job categories such as robot maintenance engineers and reliability technicians as evidence.

Amazon hasn’t specified how many of the 25,000 European jobs will fall into technical categories tied to robot maintenance and operations. The broader pledge covers total fulfillment workforce growth.

Armin Cossmann, vice president of operations for Europe, placed the rollout in terms of customer demand. “This transformation is designed to deliver a step-change in how we support our employees and serve our customers,” he said at the event. “Customer expectations aren’t slowing down, and neither are we.”

The €10 billion robotics and fulfillment commitment sits inside a larger European spending program. Amazon said it invested more than €60 billion across Europe in 2025, its largest annual regional outlay. Amazon’s full Delivering the Future announcement also covers ultra-fast delivery expansion, same-day grocery service, and the Career Choice commitment alongside the robotics systems.

The 2027 Calendar

Next-gen Proteus is in lab pilots now, with European fulfillment center deployment set for the first half of 2027. STARK expands from its Barcelona pilot to 15 European sites on the same schedule. Vulcan is live in Hamburg and adding European locations without a published site count.

On the delivery side, Amazon is opening more than 25 sub-same-day delivery locations across Europe this year, with Amazon Now extending to Manchester and Birmingham in the UK. Amazon and its delivery partners have also surpassed 100 million total deliveries across Europe via electric cargo bikes, mopeds, and on-foot couriers, avoiding more than 17,000 metric tons of carbon emissions. Amazon’s projected capital expenditure for 2026 was more than $200 billion, a more than 50 percent jump from the prior year, with AI infrastructure driving most of the increase. The €10 billion European fulfillment commitment is a regional, facility-level line inside that larger program.

Dresser said at Dartford that “Europe is at the center of how we’re building our operations for the future.” Proteus is still being piloted in an American lab.