Posted:
6 before 2021 02:43 GMT
More than 100 employees have been fired, and dozens of delivery team members have been displaced with unmanned robots to other countries, according to the Wired portal.
Amazon Prime Air, the e-commerce giant’s drone delivery service, will reduce its UK business by laying off workers and moving its staff to the company’s other projects, mentioned This Tuesday, the Wired portal, which quoted unidentified people from the company’s employees with knowledge of the situation.
Specifically, more than 100 employees have been fired and dozens of Amazon Prime Air team members have been displaced to other countries. According to the mediator’s sources, the project is coming in recent years. “collapses in it, amid “organizational chaos” exacerbated by the presence of officials.far from reality“.
For its part, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that Prime Air will continue to be present in the country after this wave of cuts, although he did not specify how many people will be part of the workforce.
Road to Breakdown: ‘You’ll Never Take Off’
Amazon Prime Air landed in the UK in 2016 and Soon all eyes were drawn With promotional videos, the company promised to start making deliveries with drone robots in the next few years. In addition, local regulators were quick to give the company the green light to conduct drone testing.
However, the problems were not long in coming. Detectives confirm that signs current crisis Began to appear at the end of 2019, in the middle Ongoing reorganizations inside the form. According to them, one of the main problems lies in the fact that many managers have Little technical knowledge To discuss the details of the work carried out in the framework of testing the UAV, since it was previously specialized in logistics and warehousing operations.
“Everything started to fall apart because of [Amazon] Accumulated a lot of things, they put in front of people who I didn’t know anything about the project Selling saturated. Everything is massive oversold So many promises that can’t be keptWired quotes from a former Amazon Prime Air employee.
In parallel, the entity faced other problems. In particular, the portal collects the history of the employee who pressure Agree button on your computer so that all photographic and video material captured — essential for analyzing threats to drones in flight — is approved regardless of whether or not there are risks.
All of this means that Amazon is still a long way from turning its promises of drone delivery into a reality, according to Wired sources. In fact, there are company employees who question Amazon’s ability to carry out the project. “When I was there, Prime Air was years away from being anything. But Never take off‘, according to a former employee.
For his part, Andreas Raptopoulos, General Manager of the unmanned robotics manufacturer Matternet, stressed that the step towards this new stage in e-commerce can take place on its own. At the end of this decade.
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