A hot potato: CEOs love to sing the praises of generative AI while tiptoeing around the fact it’s going to cost people their jobs. But Amazon boss Andy Jassy has just said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the technology will reduce the company’s corporate workforce over the next few years.
In a message sent to employees this week, Jassy said generative AI was a “once-in-a-lifetime” technology that completely changes what’s possible for customers and businesses.
Jassy went on to highlight the different areas of Amazon where AI and agents are being implemented. “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he said.
The CEO revealed that Amazon now has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, and more are coming.
Then came the part most executives skip over: “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Andy Jassy really loves generative AI
Amazon is one of many tech giants that has gone all-in on AI since its arrival. Jassy said last year that it could be as big as the cloud and internet. He also committed to spending $100 billion this year on the technology.
It might be exciting and money-saving times for Amazon and Jassy, but the company’s 1.5 million employees are unlikely to be as thrilled.
Jassy did offer some advice to worried workers: “be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively.” All that will likely be useful as they hunt for a new job.
It’s not just corporate workers that are under threat from new technology. Amazon has introduced hundreds of thousands of robots to its warehouses over the last few years. The machines are becoming increasingly advanced and human-like: the latest AI-powered model has a sense of touch. Amazon is also experimenting with humanoid robots in its delivery operations.
Some of those not being replaced by AI at Amazon are finding the technology is making their lives harder, not easier. Software engineers are now under huge pressure at the company as managers raise expectations and tighten deadlines, pushing engineers to adopt AI-powered tools like Microsoft’s Copilot and Amazon’s assistants to keep up with the relentless pace. Development teams being cut in half is exacerbating the situation, which has been compared to an assembly line.
The conversation about jobs lost to AI has intensified recently. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that the technology could wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, leading to unemployment spikes of up to 20%. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, whose company is driving the AI revolution with its hardware, disagrees – naturally.
