Amazon unveils a next-generation Proteus robot that takes spoken instructions, tied to a €10 billion upgrade of its European warehouses

Amazon unveiled a next-generation version of Proteus, its autonomous mobile robot, at its Delivering the Future event in London on June 4, 2026, alongside a commitment to invest more than €10 billion over the coming years to expand and modernize its fulfillment centers in Europe. The company said it plans to deploy the new Proteus in Europe in the first half of 2027.

The new robot is designed to take instructions in plain language. Amazon said advances in AI allow the next-generation Proteus to understand natural language, so employees can assign it tasks the way they would brief a colleague. Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, said a worker tells the robot what needs to be done and it works out the priority, the route and the timing, acting as an assistant for moving material. The robot is in a pilot phase in Amazon's labs.

The scope of the machine is also wider. The original Proteus, which Amazon describes as its first fully autonomous mobile robot, works only in dock areas and is deployed at 25 fulfillment centers in the United States. The next-generation version is intended to work anywhere on a site where items need to be moved, taking over material movement that still requires manual labor. Amazon did not publish payload, speed or size specifications.

Two other systems are part of the European plan. STARK, a collaborative tote-handling robot that picks full totes off conveyors and places them on carts, was first piloted in Barcelona and is planned to expand to 15 sites across Europe by 2027; Amazon said the idea came from an operations employee. Vulcan, which Amazon calls its first robotic system with a sense of touch, has been extended to more complex picking tasks at its facility in Hamburg, Germany.

On jobs, Amazon said it plans to grow its European fulfillment workforce by 25,000 in the coming years and will invest $1 billion in its Career Choice education program by 2030. More than 300,000 employees have taken part in Career Choice globally, including 30,000 in the United Kingdom, according to the company. Amazon said it invested €60 billion across Europe in 2025 and supports 1.5 million jobs on the continent. Armin Cossmann, vice president of operations in Europe, said the changes are meant to support employees while keeping up the pace of customer service.

The announcement builds on a fleet that is already large. Amazon said on July 1, 2025 that it had deployed its millionth robot, delivered to a fulfillment center in Japan, across a network of more than 300 facilities, and that its DeepFleet AI model improved robot fleet travel time by 10%. Vulcan was introduced in May 2025 at a Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany, where Amazon said it could pick and stow about 75% of the types of items stored in its fulfillment centers, using force feedback sensors and stereo vision.

Natural-language control matters because the bottleneck in warehouse robotics has shifted from hardware to orchestration. Mobile robots today follow routes and missions defined by software engineers or warehouse management systems. A robot that accepts spoken or typed instructions from floor staff could be redeployed between tasks without reprogramming, which is the same promise that vision-language-action models make for robot arms.

Amazon develops most of its warehouse robots in house, which sets it apart from retailers that buy from suppliers. Symbotic builds case-handling systems for Walmart and reported 70 systems in deployment at the end of March 2026. AutoStore, the Norwegian cube storage maker, reported about 89,000 robots in operation at the end of the first quarter. Mobile robot specialists such as Locus Robotics and Geek+ sell fleets to third-party logistics companies that cannot build their own.

For the global market, Amazon's move signals that large operators now expect AI interfaces, not only better hardware, to raise the return on warehouse robots. It also puts pressure on suppliers to offer similar capabilities to large retailers and logistics groups.

The open questions are specifics and labor. Amazon gave no unit numbers for the next-generation Proteus, no split of the €10 billion between robotics and buildings, and no performance data from the lab pilot. European works councils and unions will watch whether robot deployment and the promised 25,000 jobs move together.

The next checkpoints are the first European deployment of the next-generation Proteus, planned for the first half of 2027, the rollout of STARK to 15 sites by 2027, and any Amazon disclosure of an updated robot count.