The pitch for Amazon’s new warehouse robot is that you talk to it. At its “Delivering the Future” event at the Dartford fulfilment centre east of London on 4 June, Amazon unveiled a next-generation Proteus that takes instructions in plain language, no technical commands and no programming interface, alongside a plan to invest more than €10bn (about $11.6bn) in its European fulfilment network over the coming years.
The interface is the headline change. “You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing,” said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, describing the robot as an assistant for material movement.
Where the current Proteus, deployed at 25 US sites, works only in dock areas moving carts that can weigh close to 400kg, the new version is designed to operate anywhere across a fulfilment or delivery site, transporting containers as they arrive and ferrying them between workstations.
It is not shipping yet. The next-generation Proteus is being piloted in Amazon’s labs, with European deployment planned for the first half of 2027.
That timeline puts it alongside two other systems Amazon is expanding across the region: STARK, a collaborative tote-handling robot first piloted in Barcelona and set to reach 15 European sites by 2027, and Vulcan, the company’s first robot with a sense of touch, which has moved from Spokane, Washington to its Hamburg facility in Germany.
The money is the larger commitment. Amazon framed the robotics as one piece of a plan to invest more than €10bn modernising European fulfilment, and said it would grow its European fulfilment-centre workforce by 25,000 in the coming years.
That headcount figure is the company’s answer, stated upfront, to the obvious question about automation and jobs, paired with its claim that robotics has created new categories of work in reliability, maintenance, and engineering.
The robots came bundled with a delivery-speed push. Amazon said it will open more than 25 sub-same-day delivery sites across Europe this year, including in Britain and Germany, and expand Amazon Now, its ultra-fast essentials service, to Manchester and Birmingham.
Same-day fresh-grocery delivery, it said, now reaches more than 2,300 US cities and parts of Tokyo, with further expansion planned. Its next-generation assistant, Alexa+, is due to launch in 10 more countries in 2027.
The spending sits inside a much larger one. In February, Amazon forecast a more than 50% jump in capital expenditure to $200bn this year, joining its peers in an infrastructure build-out driven by AI.
Against that, €10bn for European fulfilment is a regional line item rather than the headline, but it is the part with a face on it: a robot that, by 2027, an Amazon worker in Dartford or Hamburg is meant to be able to instruct simply by telling it what to do. Whether it works as smoothly on a live warehouse floor as it does in a lab is the thing the 2027 rollout will actually test.
