REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
AI isn’t all doom and gloom for jobs, said Amazon’s Andy Jassy.
In an interview with CNBC published on Monday, the Amazon CEO deemed AI “the most transformative technology in our lifetime.” He said that it would change things not only for Amazon customers but also for its employees.
Jassy said that AI technologies would create jobs in at least two areas of the company.
“With every technical transformation, there will be fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate,” he said. “Are there going to be other jobs? We’re going to hire more people in AI and more people in robotics, and there are going to be other jobs that the technology wants you to go higher that we’ll hire over time too.”
Jassy said that AI agents, which do tasks like coding, research, analytics, and spreadsheet work, would also change the nature of every employee’s job.
“They won’t have to do as much rote work,” he said. “Every single person gets to start every task at a more advanced starting spot.”
On LinkedIn, Amazon has added at least 500 open roles worldwide with the keyword “robotics” in the job title in the past month. Roles span internships to senior applied scientist positions.
The Amazon robotics senior applied scientist job description includes tasks like “developing machine-learning capabilities and infrastructure for robotic perception and motion” and “building visualization tools for analyzing and debugging robot behavior.”
Jassy’s comments came in response to a question about his June 17 memo, which outlined how AI would change the company’s workforce.
“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 wrote.
Some Amazon employees were not happy with Jassy’s message. In internal Slack channels, some called for leadership to share in the fallout, while others saw it as a layoff warning, Business Insider reported.
“There is nothing more motivating on a Tuesday than reading that your job will be replaced by AI in a few years,” one person wrote in Slack.
Amazon employs about 1.5 million workers, according to its website, and has cut almost 28,000 jobs since the start of 2022, per Layoffs.fyi.
From Jassy’s memo and Monday’s interview, it is unclear which or how many Amazon employees would be affected by AI-driven job changes.
Other tech CEOs have raised the alarm on AI-related job cuts, especially for white-collar and entry-level roles.
In April, Micha Kaufman, the CEO and founder of the freelance-job site Fiverr, wrote in an email to employees that: “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.”
In late May, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, suggested AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told Axios in an interview. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
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