There’s a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany.
CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the “hand” of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs.
This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle.
Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine.
Aaron Parness, Director of Amazon Robotics, shows CNBC’s Katie Tarasov the gripper of its newest robot, Vulcan, at an Amazon warehouse in Spokane, Washington, on April 17, 2025.
Joseph Huerta
Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots.
When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, “not at all.”
“I don’t believe in 100% automation,” he said. “If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this.”
The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. Limiting workers to stowing on mid-height shelves, the so-called power zone, could lower the chance for worker injuries. Amazon has long struggled with injury rates far higher than those at other warehouses, though the company claims those rates have improved significantly.
“We have a ladder that we have to step onto several dozen times a day during your ten hour shift. There is a lot of reaching. We have to lunge and squat. So it’s a lot of tough body mechanics,” said Kari Freitas Hardy, an Amazon worker in Spokane. “As a picker, if I had an innovation like this where I could have stayed within my power zone, my days would have been just so much easier.”
Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.
Experts agree that humans will work alongside robots in warehouses like Amazon’s for the foreseeable future.
“Whereas if you build a terribly complicated automated system and it breaks, then everything stops,” said Bill Ray, a researcher at Gartner. “Taking out the last human is so expensive. It’s so disruptive. It would be a huge investment and an enormous risk.”
Freitas Hardy recently transitioned from picking items to working with the robots. She’s one of the 350,000 workers Amazon said it’s spent $1.2 billion to upskill since 2019.
“It would be many decades off, to have them just come in and take over, so at this point it’s more exciting if you ask me, to see the growth potential because that is where it does increase jobs on the back side,” Freitas Hardy said.
Although Freitas Hardy said she isn’t making more money in her new role, Amazon said others who participate in its Mechatronics and Robotics Apprenticeship program typically receive pay increases of about 40%.
Amazon said the team that developed Vulcan has grown from a handful of people to more than 250 employees in the three years since the project began. Amazon wouldn’t disclose how much it cost to develop Vulcan, but Parness said it represents a big business opportunity.
“Vulcan can interact with the world in a more human-like manner, and that gives us a lot more process paths that we can use automation to bring down the cost that our customer pays, and the speed with which we can deliver those products to our customers,” Parness said.
Another big return on investment may come from robots making fewer mistakes than humans.
“Product returns are incredibly high and product returns are incredibly expensive,” Gartner’s Ray said. “Some of them will be because the wrong thing was put in the box. And if you can reduce that, that’s a real cost saving straight away.”
Meanwhile, Amazon’s humanoid robot Digit has yet to bring operational efficiency. Amazon announced in 2023 that it was testing the Agility Robotics bipedal robot to help organize and move totes, but it’s yet to deploy Digit at scale.
When asked if Vulcan indicates that robots have moved from gimmick to real world application, Parness said, “It doesn’t matter if the robot has legs or wheels or it’s bolted to the floor. I think the thing that makes the robot useful is having that sense of touch so that it can interact in high contact and high clutter environments. That’s the tipping point for me, and I think we’re right there.”
For now, Vulcan is only in full operation at the Spokane warehouse. Another version of Vulcan that can pick specific items from inventory is being tested in Hamburg, Germany. Amazon said it plans to add Vulcan in more U.S. and German facilities in 2026.
Watch the video for an in-depth look at exactly how Vulcan works: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/05/06/meet-vulcan-the-first-amazon-robot-with-a-sense-of-touch.html
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully tracking and collecting the private data of users.
The attorney general said the settlement, which covers allegations in two separate lawsuits against the search engine and app giant, dwarfed all past settlements by other states with Google for similar data privacy violations.
Google’s settlement comes nearly 10 months after Paxton obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric data by users of those popular social media platforms.
“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement on Friday.
“For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won,” said Paxton.
“This $1.375 billion settlement is a major win for Texans’ privacy and tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust.”
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said the company did not admit any wrongdoing or liability in the settlement, which involves allegations related to the Chrome browser’s incognito setting, disclosures related to location history on the Google Maps app, and biometric claims related to Google Photo.
Castaneda said Google does not have to make any changes to products in connection with the settlement and that all of the policy changes that the company made in connection with the allegations were previously announced or implemented.
“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Castaneda said.
“We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”
Virtual care company Omada Health filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital health company that’s signaled its intent to hit the public markets despite a turbulent economy.
Founded in 2012, Omada offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem, according to its prospectus.
Revenue increased 57% in the first quarter to $55 million, up from $35.1 million during the same period last year, the filing said. The San Francisco-based company generated $169.8 million in revenue during 2024, up 38% from $122.8 million the previous year.
Omada’s net loss narrowed to $9.4 million during its first quarter from $19 million during the same period last year. It reported a net loss of $47.1 million in 2024, compared to a $67.5 million net loss during 2023.
The IPO market has been largely dormant across the tech sector for the past three years, and within digital health, it’s been almost completely dead. After President Donald Trump announced a sweeping tariff policy that plunged U.S. markets into turmoil last month, taking a company public is an even riskier endeavor. Online lender Klarna delayed its long-anticipated IPO, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.
But Omada Health isn’t the first digital health company to file for its public market debut this year. Virtual physical therapy startup Hinge Health filed its prospectus in March, and provided an update with its first-quarter earnings on Monday, a signal to investors that it’s looking to forge ahead.
Omada contracts with employers, and the company said it works with more than 2,000 customers and supports 679,000 members as of March 31. More than 156 million Americans suffer from at least one chronic condition, so there is a significant market opportunity, according to the company’s filing.
In 2022, Omada announced a $192 million funding round that pushed its valuation above $1 billion. U.S. Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity’s FMR LLC are the largest outside shareholders in the company, each owning between 9% and 10% of the stock.
“To our prospective shareholders, thank you for learning more about Omada. I invite you join our journey,” Omada co-founder and CEO Sean Duffy said in the filing. “In front of us is a unique chance to build a promising and successful business while truly changing lives.”
Liz Reid, vice president, search, Google speaks during an event in New Delhi on December 19, 2022.
Sajjad Hussain | AFP | Getty Images
Testimony in Google‘s antitrust search remedies trial that wrapped hearings Friday shows how the company is calculating possible changes proposed by the Department of Justice.
Google head of search Liz Reid testified in court Tuesday that the company would need to divert between 1,000 and 2,000 employees, roughly 20% of Google’s search organization, to carry out some of the proposed remedies, a source with knowledge of the proceedings confirmed.
The testimony comes during the final days of the remedies trial, which will determine what penalties should be taken against Google after a judge last year ruled the company has held an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search.
The DOJ, which filed the original antitrust suit and proposed remedies, asked the judge to force Google to share its data used for generating search results, such as click data. It also asked for the company to remove the use of “compelled syndication,” which refers to the practice of making certain deals with companies to ensure its search engine remains the default choice in browsers and smartphones.
Read more CNBC tech news
Google pays Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. It’s lucrative for Apple and a valuable way for Google to get more search volume and users.
Apple’s SVP of Services Eddy Cue testified Wednesday that Apple chooses to feature Google because it’s “the best search engine.”
The DOJ also proposed the company divest its Chrome browser but that was not included in Reid’s initial calculation, the source confirmed.
Reid on Tuesday said Google’s proprietary “Knowledge Graph” database, which it uses to surface search results, contains more than 500 billion facts, according to the source, and that Google has invested more than $20 billion in engineering costs and content acquisition over more than a decade.
“People ask Google questions they wouldn’t ask anyone else,” she said, according to the source.
Reid echoed Google’s argument that sharing its data would create privacy risks, the source confirmed.
Closing arguments for the search remedies trial will take place May 29th and 30th, followed by the judge’s decision expected in August.
The company faces a separate remedies trial for its advertising tech business, which is scheduled to begin Sept. 22.