Andy Jassy: "AI Isn't All Doom And Gloom" At Amazon

In an interview with CNBC published last 30 June, 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.

Andy 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.

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 latest memo ands interview, it is unclear which or how many Amazon employees would be affected by AI-driven job changes.