Amazon.com Inc. is expanding its same-day prescription medication delivery offer.
The mentioned e-commerce giant is launching the specified solution offerings in New York City and the Greater Los Angeles area. As part of this offer, Amazon customers can receive medicines for diabetes, flu, and other diseases within a few hours.
The Seattle-based e-commerce giant, through its Amazon Pharmacy unit, is using new small-format facilities stocked with common medicines to speed up the process of delivering concerned goods to consumers. According to information posted on the company’s website, in Brooklyn, a pharmacist and fulfillment team will be able to process an order within minutes.
The e-commerce giant is already offering the mentioned medicine delivery solution in Indianapolis, Phoenix, Seattle, Miami, and Austin. The company intends to launch this service in more than a dozen more cities in the United States by the end of the current year. It is known that customers of the e-commerce giant in College Station, Texas, can receive medicines in less than an hour using a drone.
It is worth noting that Amazon’s ownership structure includes the best American delivery service. The e-commerce giant announced that in the framework of the mentioned service used generative artificial intelligence and machine learning. In particular, AI models perform several fact-checking tasks. This scenario of using artificial intelligence helps pharmacists to fill prescriptions faster.
In early February, it became known that the e-commerce giant was laying off hundreds of employees of its healthcare unit. This decision was made as part of a corporate campaign to reduce costs. In a note to employees, Neil Lindsay, chief of Amazon Health Services, said that the layoffs relate to several hundred roles of the One Medical chain of doctors’ offices, acquired by the e-commerce giant last year, and the company’s online pharmacy operation.
The reduction of Amazon’s workforce began at the end of 2022. The corresponding decision was made in the context of the above-mentioned cost reduction initiated by the company’s chief executive officer Andy Jassy as part of an effort to carry out a kind of financial adaptation to reality, formed after the rapid expansion of the e-commerce giant during the coronavirus pandemic.
In recent months, layoffs have affected the unit, specializing in the development of the Alexa voice assistant, music arm, Prime Video, studios business, and Twitch.
Neil Lindsay informed employees in early February that the e-commerce giant had identified sectors where resources could be repositioned to invest in inventions and experiences that have a direct impact on customers. It was also noted separately that Amazon’s business in the healthcare sector is showing tremendous growth.
It is worth noting that currently, the reduction of the workforce is something like a general tendency. Many technology companies make decisions about layoffs. Since the beginning of the current year, about 32,000 employees of firms of the mentioned category have lost their jobs. The relevant data was released by the startup Layoffs.fyi, which tracks the reduction of the workforce.
