Walmart recently hired a few robots from Bossa Nova in their stores for helping their employees with the menial tasks, thus enabling them to carry out more meaningful tasks. However, the employees and robots from Bossa Nova don’t seem to be doing well together.
Let’s be honest; we all have that one colleague that tends to get under our skin, right? The idea of adding robots to the workforce to help with menial tasks sure sounds great on paper and is definitely in sync with the emerging trends. However, employees of Walmart are very vocal about the robotic employee from Bossa Nova.
Walmart has been quite thrilled about introducing robots to their stores. Walmart has rolled out robots in its stores for helping with the monitoring of inventory, cleaning floors, and unloading trucks. This is a part of the company’s efforts for getting a handle on the labor costs while it increases its expenditure on raising wages and offering services, including online grocery delivery.
The robots are, however, not being hired as an alternative to human employees. In fact, as per Mark Propes who is a senior director of central operations for Walmart US, ‘With automation, we are able to take away some of the tasks that associates don’t enjoy doing. At the same time, we continue to open up new jobs in other things in the store.’
However, according to various reports; Walmart employees are not fans of the robots by Bossa Nova. In fact, it has also been reported that the customers don’t feel easy around them as well. The robots are about six-feet tall and it makes sense that customers won’t be very comfortable around them. There are also reports of the robots being unable to complete the assigned tasks and human employees having to jump in and complete the task thus causing them to spend time in completion of tasks that the robots were hired to save.
