Amazon unveils conversational warehouse robot in Europe expansion push

Amazon used a logistics event in Dartford, England, to show how aggressively it wants AI to reshape warehouse labor in Europe. At its Delivering the Future event at the LCY3 fulfillment centre on June 4, the company unveiled the next-generation Proteus robot and linked it to a more than €10 billion investment in its European fulfillment network, turning a product demo into a statement about how the company plans to run its warehouses.

The new Proteus is designed to move beyond the dock areas where the original model works today. Amazon said the current version is already deployed at 25 U.S. fulfillment centers and can move heavy carts weighing close to 400 kilograms. The upgraded robot can be directed with plain, conversational text-based prompts, with an employee telling it what needs to be done while the machine determines the priority, route and timing. Amazon said the European rollout is planned for the first half of 2027.

That shift matters because it changes what automation does inside the building. Instead of a fixed machine carrying out one narrow task, Amazon is building a system that can follow more of the warehouse workflow. In practice, that could reduce repetitive lifting and walking while pushing more work toward coordination, supervision and exception handling. It could also change headcount demands on the floor, increase training requirements for workers who must learn to direct and monitor robots, and narrow the gap between labor and management by embedding more of the decision-making in software.

Amazon framed the robot launch as part of a wider European logistics push. The company said it plans more than 25 sub-same-day delivery sites across Europe in 2026, including an expansion of Amazon Now in Britain and new presence in Manchester and Birmingham. It said same-day grocery delivery is already available in more than 2,300 U.S. cities and parts of Tokyo, and that Alexa+ is already rolling out internationally, including in France.

The broader automation stack is growing as well. Amazon said STARK, a robotic tote-handling system first piloted in Barcelona, is set to expand to 15 European sites by 2027. Vulcan, Amazon’s first robot with a sense of touch, is also expanding to more European sites. Together with Proteus, the systems point to a warehouse model built around machine coordination rather than isolated equipment.

Amazon said it invested more than €60 billion in Europe in 2025, its largest annual investment in the region to date, and said the latest Europe plan includes 25,000 more jobs and $1 billion in employee upskilling through Career Choice. The company said it has deployed more than 1 million robots across its operations since 2012, after acquiring Kiva Systems. For Amazon, Europe is becoming the proving ground for a warehouse model where conversational AI is not a side tool, but part of the daily labor process itself.