In a Tuesday message, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that the company expects to reduce its workforce in the near future as it leans more on generative artificial intelligence technology. What does this mean for the U.S. job market, particularly in technology?
Matt Day from Bloomberg joined Holly Quan of Audacy station KCBS Radio this week to discuss.
“I think you’re probably going to run into a version of it everywhere, you know, depending on the job category,” he said of the increase of AI reliance in the tech sector.
Although Jassy said in his message that Amazon expects to “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he also said that “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 also explained that Amazon is using “Generative AI broadly across our internal operations,” to do cover tasks such as improving inventory placement and improving robot efficiency. Additionally, Jassy mentioned the company’s customer service chatbot. Still, Amazon hasn’t always had success implanting AI, as this Audacy report on its “Just Walk Out” program illustrates.
“We have strong conviction that AI agents will change how we all work and live. Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems,” said Jassy. He went on to say that “there will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field,” and that they are “coming fast.”
Day said the types of jobs Amazon plans to eliminate as it prioritizes AI aren’t quite clear yet.
“I think that the message from AI skeptics is and that: ‘Hey, listen, this is something that’s going to hit the workforce. It’s going hit it pretty hard. It’s gonna hit it in kind of categories of white-collar work that might previously have been expected to weather automation storms pretty well,’” Day told Quan.
Another question that the message left up in the air is just how many Amazon employees might be let go.
“Amazon has been an automation machine for almost its whole existence,” Day said. “You know, they really believe that once someone has figured out how to do something, they should figure out a way to automate it, whether that’s using software or robotics in the case of their warehouses. This has long been a priority for them. I think they see a lot of opportunity in these tools that can kind of, you know, move along papers and do sort of human style office work.”
Overall, Day thinks that Jassy’s message is a signal to workers, at least at Amazon, to embrace AI and learn how to work with it. He thinks that CEOs of many other companies would want to send the same message too.
“Amazon’s investing a ton and trying to get its workforce to use these tools. Other big tech companies are making similar bets. I think they really feel folks can be more effective if they’ve got AI at their fingertips. They kind of portray it as an amplifier. But at the end of the day, that's going to mean less need for human beings filling those seats,” Day said.