Amazon now has more than 750,000 robots that relieve warehouse employees from some intensely repetitive tasks. Just in time for the holiday shopping rush, the company is adding a new robotic technology, Sequoia, which is already operating at a fulfillment center in Houston, Texas. Amazon says Sequoia is a complete “reimagining” of how inventory is stored and managed, resulting in a 75 percent improvement in how inventory is identified and housed, and also improves employee safety. Amazon is also expanding its robot workforce with the addition of a bipedal robot called Digit, from Agility Robotics.

“This means we can list items for sale on Amazon.com more quickly, benefiting both sellers and customers,” according to Amazon.

Following order placement, Sequoia also reduces the time it takes to processing time at the fulfillment center by up to 25 percent, per Amazon’s news release. This improves “shipping predictability and increases the number of goods we can offer for Same-Day or Next-Day shipping,” Amazon explains.

“The revamp will change the way Amazon moves products through its fulfillment centers with new AI-equipped sortation machines and robotic arms,” writes The Wall Street Journal, noting that it will also “alter how many of the company’s vast army of workers do their jobs” and potentially impact headcount, though no guess was ventured as to the number of jobs affected.

Amazon Director of Robotic Storage Technology David Guerin is quoted saying he “expects the new system to make up a significant portion of the company’s operations in the next three to five years.”

Digit expands Amazon’s relationship with Agility Robotics, a company that is a beneficiary of the $1 billion Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. The company is prepping for a Digit test phase.

“Digit can move, grasp, and handle items in spaces and corners of warehouses in novel ways,” Amazon says, calling it a “mobile manipulator solution” whose size and shape make it “well suited for buildings that are designed for humans.”

Digit will initially be used “to help employees with tote recycling, a highly repetitive process of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.”

Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist Tye Brady told TechCrunch the company is “interested in walking robots” that can adapt to different types of terrain. “We’re experimentalists at heart,” Brady said. “We’re going to do a pilot and see how that works out.”