New York
CNN
—
Amazon is warning its employees that artificial intelligence will help the company have a smaller workforce in the future.
In a blog post Tuesday that was sent out earlier to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that efficiency gains from AI would allow the company to eventually have a reduced human workforce.
“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 wrote.
“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.
Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI “will change how we all work and live,” including “billions” of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field.” However, much of this remains speculative.
“Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast,” Jassy said.
He urged employees to view AI as “teammates we can call on at various stages of our work, and that will get wiser and more helpful with more experience.”
Jassy’s message follows increased warnings within the tech industry over AI’s effect on white collar jobs.
In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned on CNN that the technology will spike unemployment sooner than unprepared political leaders and businesses expect. AI, including tools Anthropic itself is building, could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and boost unemployment to as much as 20% in the next one to five years, he told Axios.
Critics say these warnings aren’t based off much research or evidence and are coming from the people who are poised to profit the most from AI adoption.
Daniel Zhao, lead economist and senior manager on Glassdoor’s economic research team, fully expects that AI will have a significant impact on the economy and how people work.
But how much of an effect it’s having on hiring and jobs currently is hard to tease out, he said.
“The economy and the job market have slowed, and it makes it difficult to disentangle how much of that is being driven by AI,” he said, adding that the recent slowdown in hiring activity is likely driven by economic uncertainty
CNN’s Alicia Wallace contributed to this report.
