Tsuyoshi Inajima

Bloomberg

Nissan’s next CEO says it needs partners and he’s open to Honda

/asia/2025/03/26/nissan-next-ceo-ivan-espinosa-open-to-honda/

Iain Marlow

Philip J. Heijmans

China swoops in to replace Asian USAID projects axed by Trump

/asia/2025/03/26/china-swoops-in-to-replace-asian-usaid-projects-axed-by-trump/

Lionel Lim

BYD outshines Tesla on total revenue—but there’s still some way to go before it takes Tesla’s place at the top of the EV sector

/asia/2025/03/25/byd-tesla-total-revenue-but-still-way-to-go-top-ev-sector/

Hyundai announces $21 billion investment in the U.S. ahead of Trump’s sweeping tariff threat

/asia/2025/03/25/hyundai-21-billion-investment-us-trump-sweeping-tariff-threat/

Malaysia is reportedly tracking the flow of Nvidia chips through the Southeast Asian country after pressure from Washington

/asia/2025/03/24/malaysia-reportedly-tracks-nvidia-chips-ai-china/

Lulu Yilun Chen

Jack Ma-backed Ant touts AI breakthrough on Chinese chips

/asia/2025/03/24/jack-ma-backed-ant-ai-breakthrough-chinese-chips/

Alan Wong

China frees Mintz employees as it woos top global companies

/asia/2025/03/25/china-frees-mintz-employees-as-it-woos-top-global-companies/

Yoolim Lee

Samsung Electronics co-CEO dies of heart attack at 63

/asia/2025/03/25/samsung-electronics-co-ceo-han-jong-hee-dies-of-heart-attack-at-63/

Trump tariffs on Thailand may be unavoidable says the CEO of one of the country’s biggest conglomerates

/asia/2025/03/14/trump-tariff-thailand-berli-jucker-ceo/

Intel’s incoming Malaysian-born CEO is the latest Fortune 500 semiconductor exec to hail from Asia

/asia/2025/03/13/intel-new-ceo-malaysian-lip-bu-tan-broadcom-nvidia-amd-micron/

Fortune Asia

Fortune Asia | Fortune Asia

Amazon has been on a multibillion-dollar and decade-plus-long crusade to be a leader in robotics and drive workplace efficiency. The company has two robotics facilities in the Greater Boston Area that have become Amazon Robotics. Will Amazon’s big investment in robotics pay off and what does this mean for the future of its workers?

Fortune explores how Amazon engineers are looking to robotics to revolutionize its shipping business.

Offices are a place many employees spend countless hours, and are often core to the DNA of a company. This Fortune series goes inside some of the most innovative and coveted offices of the Fortune 500 and beyond, as the future of work is continually reshaped.



Amazon Robotics: Inside the Testing Lab Where Engineers Design the Latest Machine Learning | Fortune

Features

Fortune explores how Amazon engineers are looking to robotics to revolutionize its shipping business.

Amazon Robotics: Inside the Testing Lab where Engineers Design the Latest Machine Learning | Fortune

Will Amazon’s big investment in robotics pay off and what does this mean for the future of its workers?

This robot snuck up beside me. Uh oh, this is one of the primary sites where Amazon designs, tests, and builds its fleet of more than 750,000 robots. We wanted to have this visual of the engineers being able to look out the windows and say, I can see my product. I built it. I designed it here. I can go downstairs. I'm on with the test engineers. It may sound sort of like R2-D2. The decade plus multi-billion dollar investment into robotics is key to Amazon's efficiency goals, especially as the delivery behemoth faces accusations about worker safety in its fulfillment centers. Before we start talking about productivity and efficiency, we start with safety as we think about the. The within the fulfillment centers to innovate and improve, we tend to look at the most challenging tasks lifting, manipulating, moving. So will Amazon's big robotics bet pay off as humans work side by side with robots? What will this mean for Amazon's workers and the future of its shipping business? We are about an hour outside of Boston at Amazon's robotics hub. It's a relatively new facility they bought a few years ago. We're here to look at Amazon's unique approach to robotics, which is to have the entire life cycle of the project and of the products under one roof, from development to testing to manufacturing. So Joe, we're about an hour outside of Boston. What's the history of this facility? We opened this facility about 3 years ago, and you can see on this road there's a number of Amazon facilities. Our mother's site was, was the original site, which is the Boss 12 up in North Reading, and we've grown quite a bit, and we want to open another development site and so we landed in West, Massachusetts. The talented area is rich from previous, you know, generations of technology that had been up and down the corridor here. We built this about 3 years ago, you know, when we opened it, we were a little worried, you know. Would they come and they and they have come, which is pretty exciting. Amazon has two robotics sites in the greater Boston area. The North Reading location was part of the acquisition of Kiva in 2012, which then became Amazon Robotics. What's unique about this space is how many roles it houses under one roof, from designers to scientists to testing engineers. Can I drive one? Yeah. It's the result of a decision to not outsource and maintain control of the supply chain. They seem to be communicating. Their own little language. This one's got a bin. This one I'm controlling. This one has a mind of its own. I don't really know what it's doing, but it's chirping a lot, so it seems to be happy. I pursue this strategy of vertical integration of building every aspect of the supply chain and manufacturing the robots. Well, one speed, right? The thing is having anten control, full vertical is we think gives us speed, and every time you start decoupling things, you're going to lose that speed. And then you're also going to lose the insights that the other processes have or the other functions have by having it all together, that feedback loop is super tight. The second thing is innovation, right? We get lots of great insight from those other teams. So the teams that are building the manufacturing teams have a large voice into the design cycle and they influence our design, impact our design. The folks that are deploying it also here have a large voice into the impact. This is where a lot of the software development is done for these products, and you can start with an idea on a whiteboard. 9 months later you can see it all of a sudden being in a prototype in the test lab. 18 months later you see your product rolling off the line. That is like super empowering when new candidates come in and see what's the Amazon special sauce and robotics. This is it. Amazon is #7 on this year's most innovative companies list, and its robotics program is helping lead the charge on innovation. Multiple robots are developed or tested here in Westboro, fulfilling different roles from lifting to sorting to getting out of the. Way of humans. We're going to see your favorite robot, Proteus. Yeah, when we started that, there was a team of 6, and often where innovation gets stifled is when you overstaff a program too early. And sometimes the best path to success is to keep it super small with highly talented people who can move at a pace that a larger team will slow us down. Is the main thing that you're working on these arms and checking out the Proteus. So Proteus is my specialty. These are very complicated systems. And are you working on the engineering side as well, or is it? More on the testing once it's actually out here in production. So my particular job is with testing. We'd rather find problems here, get them fixed, and then push the fixed version with the improvements and updates out production in order to make the system better. What's it like working alongside robots? Oh, it's great. I really enjoy this. I've been doing this for quite a while, so I've really, really taken a liking to the robots, both the arms, the drive units, the combination of the two of them working together. Yeah, it's really fun. Robotics are gonna fundamentally change what their jobs are, right? What tasks they're doing every day. So how do you think about that? And that's super exciting too. It's creating new opportunities. I think we've all seen there's always this tension between how does impact people, and I think we've always seen that automation and technology breakthroughs create opportunities and create new jobs, and I think it's hard to argue that Amazon has not been a great job creator in almost every domain, you know, you can. but automation is still inevitably going to come with concerns over worker replacement, and I know Amazon has invested a lot more than a billion dollars in this process of upskilling or teaching new skills to workers. Do you think upskilling is the solution to fears of replacement? There are two things. We continue to grow at a very high rate and so the number of facilities, the number of jobs we're creating is been. to see. And then the second part is, yeah, the upskilling is creating new exciting jobs and opportunities for potentially a group of people that wouldn't have that opportunity. And so I think in both dimensions we're going to see growth. And it's not just upskilling that's front of mind. A Senate committee report released in December reported conditions at Amazon warehouses were unsafe and prioritized speed over safety. How much does safety play a role in your thinking about how robotics are going to Into Amazon's process, it's front and center. Before we start talking about productivity and efficiency, we start with safety. As we think about the opportunity within the fulfillment centers to innovate and improve, we tend to look at the most challenging tasks lifting, manipulating, moving things. We're excited about what we've done, and we have a new facility with some of our newer generation technology that is 10x the automation of our previous generation. Amazon is known for its relentless pursuit of efficiency and productivity. Of course they're always trying to get packages to customers faster and faster. Robotics is really key to making that happen. At the same time, safety is a huge concern for Amazon. Joe talked about how a lot of worker functions, and especially the worker functions like repetitive movements that often lead to injuries, are being replaced by robots. And I think Amazon acknowledges this, and they put a lot of investment into upskilling or this process of basically teaching workers new skills and being able to give them new jobs. I mean, whether that's successful, I think remains to be seen, and you'll still have fears of what replacement looks like for workers, but you can see that robotics really will be the future in trying to replace a lot of the different areas that we do associate with workplace injuries and risk. I asked Joe whether he did see a future in which the warehouses or the fulfillment centers would be fully automated, and I think Amazon hasn't even fully thought that through, but I think even for a company as innovative as Amazon, it's still unclear what this might look like 10 years down the road. The great thing about Amazon, it still operates in many ways like a startup has a startup mentality of speed. You're able to innovate at a speed and you don't get bogged down with bureaucracy over sometimes a big company. I mean, there have been challenging times when I was sure this thing was going to work in some way and it didn't, and the disappointment your idea just didn't pan out. But to see the impact when you go globally, our products have made to our associates that flywheel of driving customer selection, lower prices and speed, I get to see it real time and so that's been pretty it's like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

From spontaneous backpacking trips to AI-powered, hyper-personalized itineraries, travel has undergone a radical transformation. In this episode of Leadership Next, hosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to explore the future of travel. Glenn reflects on his early experiences navigating the world before smartphones, how AI is revolutionizing trip planning, and why personalization is key to the industry's evolution. He also discusses Booking Holdings’ rapid growth, its response to global crises like the Ukrainian refugee situation, and the industry’s potential next frontier—hypersonic travel. Plus, he shares insights on leading through uncertainty, the resilience of the travel industry, and why, despite a lifetime of global adventures, his favorite place to travel is home.

The Connected Trip: Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel on the Future of Travel

Photo Courtesy of Booking Holdings; Graphic by Fortune

Leadership

Before Thrive Market, “accidental entrepreneur” Nick Green ran his first business from a Harvard dorm room.

Thrive Market’s millennial CEO on building a "Costco model" for healthy eating

It sounds terrible to say this, but the way I described that first entrepreneurial journey was failing my way to success. I made every mistake in the book from bad hires to micromanaging to operational mistakes. My name is Nick Green, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, and this is my secret to success. I grew up middle class in middle America. I had a mom who grew up in a large Mexican American family and kind of saw firsthand in her family the facts of lifestyle diseases related to diet, and my mom, this is, you know, again 90s in Minnesota, had this vision for basically charting a different course for our family and then I got to see how hard she had to work to make that possible. So we were that weird house on the block that had no sugared cereal. No soda. I saw her driving across town to find healthier options. I saw her clipping coupons to make it all work on a budget, so it was really seared into my brain at an early age that being healthy is important, but being healthy costs money. My first ever job was actually starting my first company. After doing really well on the SAT, I started teaching SAT classes in high school. And that evolved into my first business when I was an undergrad at Harvard called ID Insiders. So I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I didn't think about it as starting a business at the time, but it was really interesting as an entrepreneur running my business in parallel. A lot of what I was learning in the business, it was kind of unlearning things I had learned in school and so probably the biggest lesson that I learned as an entrepreneur during those four years was that the path to success is really littered with failure. And you know, a lot of it was thinking that because I was the expert on the content of what we delivered the test prep, that I would also be the expert on the business. So early on I was trying to do everything myself. I was just learning through my own mistakes. We got bought 3 years later by another test prep company and then you know in the back half of that year sort of looking at what my next thing was going to be and I knew I wanted to do something that could have even more scale potential and more impact and so I met Ginard, my first co-founder. Very randomly we got introduced through a friend. He pitched me initially as an angel investor, and he had this big idea to make healthy living accessible to anybody by bringing a Groupon like buying event model to healthy nutritious food. By the end of the meeting, I was basically pitching him on like let's do something together in this space. I don't know about Groupon for Healthy food. Let's whiteboard this a bit, and two weeks later we are iterating on different ways that we might be able to approach affordability. And that was when we stumbled into the Costco model and how powerful membership could be as a way to bring prices down, create engagement, create community. We had some real challenges from the get-go in fundraising, talked to 50+ VCs, all of whom rejected us. We had some real challenges in building the site. Neither of us had a technology background, but looking back on it, I think the thing that really kept us going was that strength of the mission. We knew the mission from day one. And it was our North Star and the way I described my first company at IB Insiders was I was kind of on a roller coaster. And even though I was buckled in, I didn't know it. So every time we hit a turn, I thought I was going to fall out. I think the difference with Tri Market was having, you know, done a startup before. I knew I had a seat belt on and I knew that a lot can go wrong and you can still figure it out. And so what we're trying to do is offer a solution so that you don't have to just go to what's closest to you. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg to afford the price premiums for healthy products in those grocery stores. Our mission since day one has been to make healthy sustainable living easy, affordable and accessible to anyone. So we started a petitioning the USDA back in 2016 to accept food stamps online. Fast forward eight years we became the first pure play e-commerce retailer to be able to accept Snap and EBT online. So there are a number of barriers to getting healthy and what we found is that price is a very important barrier, but I would say the biggest barrier actually. is more around the difficulty of knowing how to navigate this landscape of healthy food and in some ways the internet has made that more treacherous because you've got, you know, people from every different direction giving health advice, you've got Companies that have products that probably aren't healthy but are marketing them as healthy and so I think many, many people are just plain confused. I like, do I want to eat more meat or less meat? Is fat bad or carbs bad? Does organic matter or doesn't it matter? And it's enough to make someone's head spin. And so a lot of what we're doing at Thrive is making that process easier by letting people outsource their trust to us so that they know every product reaches this high bar of quality that we are 100% focused on making the product safe, sourcing them ethically so that you can feel good and proud of whatever you buy, and so we're really proud of what we've achieved over the last 10 years and yet at the same time we're very cognizant. That we are just getting started. There are 100 million US households, we only have 1.5 million members. We are doing hundreds of millions in sales, but there is a $1 trillion CPG market and from a mission standpoint, we have so much further that we can go to truly make healthy living easy, affordable and accessible. So we are really excited to reach a milestone, but also even more excited about what the future holds and knowing that we are still in the early innings.

Oura is more than just a sleep tracker—it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being, embraced by everyone from high-profile figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian to everyday users looking to optimize their health. Hale explores Oura’s expansion into activity readiness and women’s health, the importance of accuracy in wearables, and the growing consumer demand for data privacy—especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. He also shares compelling stories of how Oura has helped athletes, cancer patients, and even non-drinkers make informed lifestyle choices and develop healthier habits. Plus, hear his take on whether too much health data can be a bad thing—and what Oura is doing to remain a trusted companion in personal health.

Giving Your Body a Voice: Oura’s CEO on the Power of Wearables

In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being.

Oura is more than just a sleep tracker—it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being.

Asia - Fortune Asia

Nissan’s next CEO says it needs partners and he’s open to Honda

Tech

BYD outshines Tesla on total revenue—but there’s still some way to go before it takes Tesla’s place at the top of the EV sector

Malaysia is reportedly tracking the flow of Nvidia chips through the Southeast Asian country after pressure from Washington

Jack Ma-backed Ant touts AI breakthrough on Chinese chips

Finance

Nissan’s next CEO says it needs partners and he’s open to Honda

China swoops in to replace Asian USAID projects axed by Trump

China frees Mintz employees as it woos top global companies

Leadership

Samsung Electronics co-CEO dies of heart attack at 63

Trump tariffs on Thailand may be unavoidable says the CEO of one of the country’s biggest conglomerates

Intel’s incoming Malaysian-born CEO is the latest Fortune 500 semiconductor exec to hail from Asia