At an Amazon warehouse in Northeast Ohio, Laura works the night shift, operating an order picker that puts her 40 feet in the air.
“I’m a treasure hunter,” she says. “I use a forklift to go find stuff.”
The warehouse has not yet adopted any of the cutting-edge robotics systems that are transforming other Amazon facilities—but automation is creeping in.
In the 18 months since she started this job, Laura—who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation—has seen a major change in the HR presence at her warehouse. At most Amazon warehouses, a team of HR employees used to be available on-site to help workers resolve issues as they arise, reachable for most of their shift. But something changed this year.
“Now it’s like HR is there on banking hours,” Laura says, noting that she never sees an HR employee over the weekend. “On night shifts, we’re lucky to see them one day a week.”
Laura has already felt the effects of this change, which has forced workers like her to use an app to handle all HR concerns. When her cousin died last year, she tried to take a day off through the app, only to be told she needed to provide proof of kinship to get it approved.
“The app kept blocking it, because I didn’t have a death certificate,” she says, which meant she had to track down an HR person who could assist.
On another occasion when Laura was hospitalized, the app wouldn’t allow her to request a day off for medical reasons. She eventually ended up being off work for three days—which required her to apply for a leave of absence that took a month to be resolved because the app kept requesting additional medical paperwork.
These days, if she does manage to track down someone in HR, “the first thing they ask me is if I tried to do it through the app,” she says. “But I’ve obviously already tried that if I’m looking for a human being.”
Amazon has been explicit about its vision to become a leaner organization and use automation to fill in the gaps. “We strive to operate like the world’s largest startup,” the CEO, Andy Jassy, wrote in his 2024 letter to shareholders, soon after issuing an edict to trim managerial bloat. This ethos seems to have taken root in Amazon’s HR department, which was reportedly a major target of the recent layoffs that sent shock waves through the company.
The cuts to HR date back to 2023, when Amazon slashed over 27,000 jobs across two rounds of layoffs that largely impacted those employees—not long after the company had rebranded the HR team as people experience and technology (PXT), a move that hinted at the changes to come. Over the last two years, Amazon has laid off another 30,000 workers. The company claims it has been excising middle management in a bid to “increase ownership and realize efficiency gains,” as its HR chief, Beth Galetti, put it in a memo to employees.
Despite citing the “transformative” nature of generative artificial intelligence in its layoff announcement, the company has strenuously denied that its sweeping investment in automation was directly responsible for the job losses. “It’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said on an earnings call last fall. “It’s culture.”
But interviews with warehouse associates and former HR employees, along with legal filings, reveal how Amazon’s growing reliance on automation appears to be removing humans from the HR process. This affects both the frontline workers who handle inventory and pack orders, and corporate employees.
When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson, Montana MacLachlan, said: “Ensuring the health and well-being of our employees is our greatest responsibility, and we strive to provide . . . safe and supportive environments for everyone. Thank you for sharing these alleged personal experiences, as we always want to be better. However, a small sample of anecdotes don’t reflect the experiences of our workforce of more than 1.5 million employees or the extensive accommodations and benefits we provide.”
These claims echo anonymous accounts that are littered across social media and Reddit forums, where hundreds of thousands of Amazon warehouse associates flock to air grievances and seek advice. In post after post, warehouse associates appear to be asking the same question more workers are likely to soon be voicing as companies are poised to follow Amazon’s lead:
What happened to HR?
In a recent survey of workers at Amazon and Walmart, which was exclusively shared with Fast Company, the worker advocacy nonprofit United for Respect found that the chief concern for the majority of them was how HR decisions were being outsourced to automated systems. More than half of the workers expressed concerns that AI usage in the workplace was supplanting human contact, eroding their interactions with coworkers and managers.
For the workers who keep Amazon warehouses running, there are any number of routine concerns that might lead them to the HR desk, from scheduling issues to requesting time off. Amazon is notorious for its workplace monitoring system, which closely tracks productivity and leaves little margin for error; this model has been one of the driving forces behind union organizing campaigns at Amazon warehouses. The company tracks attendance through a balance of unpaid time off, which can be grounds for termination if it becomes negative. Given the sheer number of jobs at Amazon—not to mention the inherent dangers of working in a warehouse—many people turn to HR to manage medical leave for injuries or workplace accommodations for disabilities and pregnancies.
All of this is now mediated through the A to Z app—Amazon’s internal tool for warehouse workers—and an AI-powered chatbot named Aza, which one worker likened to “ChatGPT in an Amazon T-shirt.” While Amazon workers have used the app for years to handle HR issues, they could also turn to on-site employees.
The Amazon spokesperson said AI tools like Aza were intended to handle “the most straightforward requests,” which the company claims account for the majority of questions that HR employees address daily. “With the help of AI, managers and PXT partners have more time to focus on more complex needs,” MacLachlan said. “We’ll keep listening to our teams’ feedback and investigating any concerns they raise as we take every case seriously, and if we find that we got something wrong, we’ll work hard to make it right.”
But at Amazon warehouses across the country, the number of HR employees has dwindled over the last couple of years. Several workers told Fast Company they used to have a group of employees assigned to their warehouse; now, they may not encounter even a single HR person who remains on site for their entire shift. Some of them said their HR staff was now shared across warehouses. On social media and Reddit, Amazon workers share images of computer kiosks and signs directing them to “Ask Aza,” which have taken the place of HR employees in some warehouses. (“Employees have consistent access to our PXT team,” said MacLachlan, the spokesperson. “If a PXT partner occasionally works from a different site, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re available to employees via a number of channels.”)
“The HR desk is always empty,” says Italo Medelius, an Amazon worker based in North Carolina. “You never see anybody there. I’ve seen that there’s a line of people waiting for HR, but the guy never shows up. The last time that I tried to talk to HR, there were maybe five people waiting in line, and a manager came out and said, ‘The HR person isn’t here. He only works from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.’”
A worker in Georgia who asked to remain anonymous claimed there was no formal announcement when the company started paring back the HR presence at her warehouse, which dropped from about three to five employees to one on a good day. Multiple warehouse associates said they had personally seen that there was virtually no HR coverage during overnight shifts and on weekends, or had heard that was the case from other workers. Employees used to be able to reach HR through a site-specific email address, but workers claim that is no longer the case—which forces them to use the app if they can’t find an HR person on site. (MacLachlan noted that Amazon employees have “multiple ways to get support—from on-site PXT and managers to digital tools that can help answer questions quickly.”)
When the Georgia-based worker started at Amazon five years ago, HR was “more helpful,” she says. “Problems usually got resolved within five to 10 minutes.” Now, even when they are available in person, “there’s only so much they can do,” she says, beyond showing workers how to use the app.
In the absence of reliable HR, some Amazon workers take their complaints to the Voice of Associates (VOA) board, an online forum where warehouse workers can share feedback and concerns with site managers and leadership. “I tell everybody the VOA board is the most helpful thing that you can use,” says Ron “Mr. Ron” Sewell, another worker in Georgia who said corporate employees paid a visit to the warehouse where he previously worked, following a flurry of posts on the VOA board. “Just be nice. Be professional.”
Susan, a former HR employee who worked at Amazon for 15 years across warehouses and as an HR investigator, says the company has been laying the groundwork for this evolution for over a decade. Amazon had started trying to eliminate HR-adjacent roles in warehouses as early as 2014, according to Susan, who asked to remain anonymous.
“We were told when we started projects, ‘Here’s the end game: We want to remove site HR as much as possible,'” she says. “‘We want everything to be self-service’—because it’s just not scalable to hire as many people as they were hiring for each of the [warehouses].”
Over the last several years, the company has turned its attention to the HR desk, slowly chipping away at its presence in warehouses—moving from two floor desks to just one, then cutting back on their hours. Eventually, Susan says, Amazon decided it wasn’t necessary to fully monitor the desk during work hours and warehouse associates should just swing by during breaks.
“You’re going to stand in line for 25 minutes, and then spend two minutes talking to somebody and not eat lunch,” she says. “People just got to the point where they were like, okay, I might as well talk to the AI. We removed enough of the [ease] of them coming out and talking to HR. They were just forced to do that.”
Even as Amazon has grown ever more sophisticated in its operations, revamping its warehouses with cutting-edge robotics systems, worker accounts suggest its approach to people management can fall short of the company’s own high standards.
“There are things Amazon does extremely well,” says David, a warehouse worker based in New York City who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his identity. “They’re psychotically effective at fine-tuning things that they care about. And then they really don’t pretend to care on the things they don’t [care about].”
He says the AI chatbot offers blanket statements instead of specific information. Many workers don’t fare much better with the kiosks, which only employees at a higher level can fully unlock—not that it necessarily offers greater insight. David says he has waited hours or days just to speak with a more senior employee who has special access, only to find that they can’t resolve the issue. Very often, he says, the handful of HR employees who should be stationed at the warehouse don’t show up until workers are nearly done with their shift, forcing them to plead their case to managers who may or may not be able to assist.
“The problem either resolves itself or it doesn’t, and you just have to live with that,” he says. “With Amazon, it’s not really worker versus manager. It’s the system versus everyone.”
If customer obsession is a core guiding principle for Amazon, the same could be said of its exacting standards for productivity. Warehouse associates can be terminated for exhausting their reserve of unpaid time off (UPT) or crossing a certain threshold of time off-task, which means workers often need to resolve HR issues urgently. Reducing the HR presence at warehouses has made this more of a hurdle than it already was for many workers. Multiple workers said they often get stuck in a loop when they seek help from the AI chatbot. According to David, the app would direct him to speak with an HR person but not provide a phone number or email; if he managed to track down an HR employee in person, he would get redirected to the app. This Kafkaesque scenario can require weeks to resolve, putting the livelihood of affected employees at risk; as time goes on, they are penalized for failing to achieve resolution. (Amazon claimed employees can still access PXT employees by phone, and they are available around the clock through the app. MacLachlan added: “We have dedicated specialists in areas like leaves of absence, benefits, and accommodations—and when an employee raises an issue, we connect them with the person best equipped to help.”)
When David found that his working hours were capped at just 10 a week, he kept petitioning HR to address the issue, with no success. When he sought help from managers, none could explain why his hours were being capped. He faced similar frustrations over Amazon’s disciplinary system. For a subset of workers with flexible schedules, Amazon uses a point system rather than a UPT balance to track attendance. Workers may be terminated if they accumulate eight points, according to David and other reporting.
But it’s not always clear why they are penalized with points, as was the case when David discovered that he had somehow received four points. Sometimes it’s just a glitch or technical issue—or the app crashes as workers are trying to schedule shifts, and they fall short of their minimum work requirements. (MacLachlan said Amazon’s AI tools offered a “net-positive experience” for employees.)
There is mounting evidence, however, that workers who need accommodations or medical leave are particularly vulnerable as Amazon continues to automate HR. “Accommodations were already an issue before, even when we had an HR team,” says Medelius, the worker in North Carolina. “And now it’s even worse. Accommodations are just being denied left and right.”
When April Watson started working at an Amazon warehouse in Georgia in late 2021, she claims there were at least six HR employees on site at any given point. By the start of this year, there were only two left—and within a few months, they had been dispensed with as well, replaced by signs that directed workers to the app instead.
When Watson suffered a concussion on the job earlier this year, she was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace. Even with the requisite medical paperwork, Watson’s accommodations were not granted for more than a month, in part because the AI chatbot produced the wrong medical form. In that time, she was disciplined for making mistakes and not working quickly enough.
Watson’s experience is not unique. In the last few years, multiple proposed class action lawsuits have documented claims from former and current workers who say Amazon has denied accommodations to disabled workers or penalized them for requesting accommodations. (Amazon contested these allegations, noting that the company has decreased the time it takes to resolve cases. “We provide the accommodations that employees need to be successful in their roles, and any claim to the contrary is false,” MacLachlan said.)
The lead plaintiff in one such case is Cayla Lyster, a warehouse worker in New York state who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome long before she was hired. Lyster claims Amazon did not adequately accommodate her disability after changing her job duties in 2023. According to the suit, which was filed by the legal advocacy organization A Better Balance, Lyster was forced to take unpaid leaves of absence while waiting for approvals for reasonable accommodations; while on leave, she claims Amazon docked her UPT balance and repeatedly told her she was at risk of being fired. In response to a separate case brought by A Better Balance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently determined that Amazon had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by either denying accommodations to warehouse workers or not implementing them properly. (Amazon said it was inaccurate to suggest that the company denied accommodations requests without reason or forced employees to go on leave.)
Another case brought by Othea Jones, a former warehouse worker in Texas, indicates this pattern may have been accelerated by Amazon’s dependence on automated HR. In late 2023, after having a stroke while at work, Jones was told by her doctor that she would need accommodations to continue safely doing her job. But her accommodations were repeatedly denied when she submitted requests through the app, forcing her to take time off; barely two months later, she was fired for too many absences.
The complaint alleges that Amazon does not engage in a good faith dialogue over reasonable accommodations, in part because “the app simply is not designed to allow such an interactive process.” (Elsewhere, it argues that “the A to Z app, is, to be frank, a disaster.”) The lawsuit adds that the law “does not require an employee go through voluminous channels, automated responses, and appeal procedures before being able to speak to a real, live person about their accommodation.” (Jones has voluntarily dismissed her complaint, though her lawyers previously said they intended to refile.)
It’s not only warehouse workers who are being denied accommodations through the app, especially as Amazon has imposed a strict in-office policy on its corporate workforce in the last few years. According to court records reviewed by Fast Company, a new lawsuit compiles allegations from a group of 14 named plaintiffs who held both warehouse and corporate jobs, drawing on a litany of claims from workers who dealt with denials and delays when requesting accommodations through the MyHR portal within Amazon’s A to Z app; their experiences are defined by unforced errors and misplaced documentation, with a number of them reportedly getting fired over the course of navigating their accommodations case. (“Many of the allegations in this case are simply untrue and intentionally misleading, and we plan to demonstrate that through the legal process,” MacLachlan said.)
The lawsuit claims that Amazon reviews an estimated 255,000 reasonable accommodation cases annually and uses AI to “read, review, and respond” to those requests. (One former warehouse worker, Michelle Grissom, alleged that after being terminated, she learned that MyHR used an “automated process” to approve or deny medical accommodations.) It also argues that corporate employees face similar obstacles when they seek out accommodations for remote work.
An engineer named Eleazar Zwillinger said he could not upload medical documentation to MyHR, and the AI chatbot directed him to create a new case with a button that did not exist; later in the process, a consultant overseeing his case admitted that there was “pressure to deny accommodations.” Christi Springer, another corporate employee, said after her role was eliminated, she received a call from HR that sounded like an “AI voice.”
One of the plaintiffs, Ashley Cook, was a cloud engineer who had requested accommodations to work from home and take intermittent breaks, after she started experiencing uterine fibroids that caused excessive bleeding. Her manager would not grant any accommodations and told her she had to formally request them through the A to Z app. Amazon responded by allowing her to take a medical leave, but it was indefinitely extended against her wishes. She was repeatedly told her medical paperwork was not sufficient, even though she had uploaded it to the app multiple times. When Cook tried to discuss a new role with her manager, she was told yet again to consult the app, leaving her in a holding pattern—much like many of the warehouse workers who raise HR issues.
This is not an especially surprising evolution for Amazon, which has long relied on automation and metrics to mediate interactions with employees, especially warehouse staff. Until recently, however, Amazon had actually expanded its HR workforce: In 2021, in the midst of a pandemic hiring spree, the company told The New York Times that its HR staff in warehouses had increased by 60% since 2019, in line with the overall growth of the warehouse workforce.
But this was short-lived: By 2023, Amazon was already trimming head count through layoffs that targeted HR employees. According to a Fortune report last fall, the entire PXT department had over 10,000 employees globally in 2025. (Meanwhile, Amazon’s overall head count was more than 1.57 million.)
Laura, the Ohio-based warehouse worker, claims that her daughter—who worked in HR until recently—saw the writing on the wall and successfully transferred into another role before the recent layoffs. “HR was basically becoming a computer processing job,” she says. “You’re just putting information in the computer, and the computer spits out the answer. That’s why she wanted to leave.” Barely two weeks later, multiple friends who had remained in HR lost their jobs.
Courtney Badger, a former HR professional who was laid off from Amazon in May, says she knows of thousands of employees across HR, including recruiters, who lost their jobs in the last year. As Amazon shed HR employees, Badger—whose job involved looking into complaints brought by warehouse workers—fielded more complaints because workers didn’t know where else to turn.
“I did notice a lack of HR presence,” she says. “The less on-site people you have, the more people [that] are submitting HR claims and cases that shouldn’t ever come to us. It would just create this backlog.”
Badger’s job required her to connect with on-site HR employees, who were typically responsible for making a final decision based on her recommendations. The dearth of HR could also make it harder to reach employees or witnesses that she needed to speak with, and she would often have to contact a manager to track down an employee.
In just under a year, she also watched as Amazon tried to automate more and more of her job—and then imposed more stringent productivity metrics. One of the tools at their disposal was a transcription service for her calls with employees; another one, Amazon Quick Suite, was intended to help them write up reports more easily. (At the same time, she was surprised by the tasks Amazon chose not to automate, like scheduling calls and email updates.)
“Because of automation, the expectations for how quickly we could do our job kept increasing,” Badger says. “When I first started, you were required to close four cases a week. When I left—and they said it was because automation made things faster—you were required to close nine cases a week.”
As her team scrambled to keep up with their workload, Badger says she found it difficult to be as thorough and give cases—and workers—the attention they deserved.
“Amazon is so metrics driven,” she says. “There’s just a lot of pressure to get your job done.”
The company’s vision, according to Badger, is for AI to eventually handle most of the job she performed, aside from taking phone calls with employees. When Badger was laid off, she claims the company explained the decision by explicitly saying they didn’t need as many people now that they had AI.
“It’s called Human Resources,” she says. “There’s supposed to be a human element to it. I watched the ‘human’ get sucked out of the job in the short amount of time that I was there.”
On the HR investigations team, there seems to have been a concerted effort to reduce head count due to efficiency gains from the use of AI, according to Susan, the former HR employee with a 15-year tenure at Amazon. The team had been fully distributed even prior to the pandemic.
But in 2025, Amazon decided everyone on the team would need to relocate to one of a handful of offices if they wanted to stay with the company—a move that Susan claims was expressly intended to eliminate jobs, per conversations she had with senior leaders who had insight into the decision. (“Any claims that our return-to-office policy was an attempt to reduce headcount are false,” the Amazon spokesperson said.) Before the return-to-office push, there were over 100 people on the team, according to Susan; now, she believes headcount is closer to 20.
But she also found that the AI tools did, in fact, make her far more productive. “I was the highest [performer] pretty much every week that I was on the team,” she says. “And I will tell you: What I normally was supposed to do in a 40-hour week, I could easily do in an eight-hour day.”
Susan had seen Amazon invest in automation for years. But this was, perhaps, the first time she had seriously considered that her job could become superfluous in the near future—for better and for worse.
“Quite honestly, it’s scary to see how well it worked,” she says. “I actually have spent the last year thinking, ‘Are there going to be any HR roles in five years?’ Because as companies start to automate these things, we’ve always provided our value in being able to sit down and de-escalate a situation or talk through a situation. But short of that, there’s not much that we do that a computer couldn’t do. It is scary. It is very scary.”