Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has built its empire on a relentless obsession with doing things faster and cheaper, so news that it's quietly working to automate one of the last stubbornly manual corners of its operation should surprise nobody. What might raise an eyebrow is just how ambitious the plan appears.
The project, known internally as Tetromino, is a reported effort to bring AI and robotics to the final stretch of Amazon's delivery network: the fiddly business of sorting packages and readying them for the vans that carry them to your door. It's exactly the kind of labor-heavy work that has so far resisted mechanization, and cracking it could make the whole system dramatically more efficient.
