REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that generative AI is changing the company’s workflow.
- He said that in addition to “efficiency gains,” he expects that AI could mean white-collar job cuts.
- It’s unclear exactly how widespread the reduction in force could be — or when it will happen.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a blunt new message about AI: It is going to “reduce” the company’s workforce in the next few years.
“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy said in a memo posted to the Amazon website. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
“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,” he continued.
Amazon currently employs about 1.5 million workers, according to its website. It is unclear how many employees, or in which sectors, would be affected by AI-driven job cuts.
Business Insider previously reported that the company is freezing its hiring budget for its retail business this year.
In a March earnings call, the company announced it would spend $100 billion on capital expenditures, mostly driven by AI investments and data centers, Business Insider reported.
Jassy is not the first executive to suggest that advancements in AI will likely translate to job cuts in their businesses. The conversations around these types of reductions in force have become increasingly common — and less hypothetical.
Allison Kirkby, CEO of the British telecom giant BT, warned that AI may lead to further job cuts at the firm after BT in 2023 announced plans to eliminate as many as 55,000 roles by 2030, Business Insider previously reported.
In late May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said earlier this month that he expects the impact of AI on white-collar jobs to be so significant that it will lead to a recession.
“It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, project manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — AI is coming for you,” Micha Kaufman, the the CEO and founder of the freelance-job site Fiverr, wrote in an April email to employees that he shared on LinkedIn.
Jassy had some advice for workers in his statement about how to navigate the changing professional landscape, describing AI as “the most transformative technology since the Internet.”
“As we go through this transformation together, 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, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” Jassy said. “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”
When reached by Business Insider, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment further on Jassy’s remarks.
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