'We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,' CEO says
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expects the organisation's workforce to shrink as the company rolls out more generative AI and agents.
Jassy, in a message to employees, believes that generative AI and agents will change the way work is done at Amazon.
"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," the CEO said in the message, which was also posted on the company's blog.
"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."
Jassy's statement comes after the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed earlier this year that 41% of employers plan to downsize their workforce where AI can replicate people's work.
The WEF findings add to the debate surrounding AI's impact on the workforce, where experts such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have predicted that the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and hike unemployment by up to 20%.
But there are others who don't believe these estimations, such as White House AI Czar David Sacks, who believes that human jobs will not be replaced entirely by artificial intelligence.
At Amazon, Jassy noted that generative AI is already implemented across its internal operations, such as customer service and fulfilment network.
But he believes this is just the "relative beginning" and that AI agents will spark bigger changes at work.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they're coming, and coming fast," the CEO said.
According to Jassy, AI agents will be able to perform tasks, such as scouring the internet, summarising results, engaging in deep research, writing code, finding anomalies, and automating a lot of time-consuming tasks.
"Agents will be teammates that we can call on at various stages of our work, and that will get wiser and more helpful with more experience," he said.
"If we build and leverage the right agents, it's going to rapidly accelerate our ability to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and it's going to make our jobs even more exciting and fun than they are today."
In the wake of the company's transformation, Jassy advised employees to embrace AI.
"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," he 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."
