PYMNTS.com December 4, 2023
A decade ago, in 2013, Amazon counted around a thousand robots across its fulfilment warehouses.
That same year, tech giant Google spent more on headcount and people costs than it did compute and data.
Today, 10 years later, the fleet of robots powering Amazon’s warehouses numbers around 750,000 — and Google, now Alphabet, spends more on compute costs than it does its employee base.
It is hard to see those numbers reversing.
That’s because life in a connected economy like ours is driven by investments in promising innovations.
After all, it wasn’t until 2013 that the Federal Reserve System’s “Payment System Improvement – Consultation Paper” was published, leading to 2015’s “Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System” white paper and...