Amazon unveils Blue Jay, a multi-arm robot that merges three workstations, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI for warehouse managers

Amazon introduced two new tools for its fulfillment network on October 22, 2025, at its annual Delivering the Future event. The first, Blue Jay, is a robotic cell in which several arms work together on picking, stowing and consolidating orders. The second, Project Eluna, is an agentic AI system that reads live and historical facility data and tells operations managers in plain language where trouble is building. Amazon presented both as ways to take repetitive and physically demanding work off employees and to speed up deliveries.

According to Amazon's own account, Blue Jay folds what had been three separate robotic stations into a single workspace. At the South Carolina fulfillment site where it was being tested, the company said the system could already handle roughly 75% of the different item types Amazon stores. Amazon described it as a core technology for its Same-Day sites, the smaller buildings that serve the fastest delivery promises, where floor space is the binding constraint.

The development timeline was the figure Amazon stressed most. The company said Blue Jay moved from concept to production in just over a year, against three years or more for earlier systems such as Robin, Cardinal and Sparrow. It credited digital twins, simulations that model real physics so engineers can test designs virtually, together with the data and experience gathered from its existing robot fleet. Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, framed the goal as making technology a practical tool that leaves work safer and more rewarding.

Project Eluna addresses a different bottleneck: the time managers spend reading dashboards. Amazon said the system analyses historical and real-time data, anticipates congestion and recommends actions, and that operators can query it in natural language, for example by asking where to move staff to avoid a bottleneck. The pilot ran at one fulfillment center in Tennessee during the 2025 holiday season, with sortation as the first use case. Amazon's event summary added that Eluna can help plan ergonomic job rotations and maintenance schedules.

The announcements sat inside a wider package. Amazon also showed smart glasses for delivery drivers, built with input from hundreds of delivery associates, said more than 300,000 drivers had completed its virtual reality training since 2022, and repeated a $4 billion plan to triple its rural delivery network by 2026. On the workforce side it pointed to Career Choice, mechatronics and robotics apprenticeships and new AI training, and said it was hiring 250,000 people for the holiday period.

Blue Jay arrived as the latest step in a fast run of robotics disclosures. In May 2025 Amazon introduced Vulcan, a robot with force feedback sensing that it said could pick and stow about 75% of item types, deployed in Spokane, Washington and Hamburg, Germany. On July 1, 2025 it said it had deployed its one millionth robot, at a site in Japan, across more than 300 facilities, and launched DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model it said cut fleet travel time by 10%.

The competitive frame is crowded. Specialist suppliers such as Symbotic, AutoStore, Ocado, Exotec, Locus Robotics, Geek+, Dexterity and Mujin sell storage, mobile robot and picking systems to retailers and logistics groups that cannot build their own. Amazon, with its own engineering teams and network data, is the benchmark they are measured against. Blue Jay signalled that Amazon wants to own the integrated pick, stow and consolidate cell in house, the part of the warehouse where specialist vendors still compete hardest on manipulation.

The technical bet behind Blue Jay was coordination. A single robot arm at a station handles one task at a time; several arms sharing a workspace must plan around each other, share perception of the same totes and avoid collisions while keeping throughput high. Simulation lets engineers rehearse those interactions before hardware exists, which is how Amazon explained the compressed schedule. Eluna is a software layer above the floor, a language model interface over operational data that suggests decisions rather than executing them.

The programme did not last in its announced form. An update on Amazon's Blue Jay page, dated February 25, 2026, says the company is no longer using Blue Jay in operations and that the underlying technology will continue to support employees across its network. Amazon gave no reason on that page and did not say whether the South Carolina cell had been expanded before it was withdrawn.

The main open questions follow from that reversal. Amazon disclosed no throughput, cost or reliability numbers for Blue Jay, so the 75% item coverage figure was never tied to a rate. For Eluna, Amazon disclosed a single pilot site and no measured outcome. Both disclosures were made at a media event, and neither came with independent data.