Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told his workforce that their jobs could be taken by generative AI in the coming years.
In a memo sent to employees on 17 June, Jassy wrote that Amazon expects “efficiency gains” from AI across the company, which would result in job losses.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote in the memo. “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.”
To protect themselves from AI-job cuts, Jassy urged staff to be “curious” about AI, and to educate themselves and attend workshops and training sessions within the company. Though he ends that paragraph with a call to get more done with “scrappier” teams.
The memo also suggested that those who embraced the change could become “conversant in AI” and help to improve Amazon’s overall AI capabilities. Jassy, who first started at Amazon in 1997 as an assistant product manager, likened the learning curve to his own experience of working on internal leaner teams within AWS.
“We didn’t have tools resembling anything like generative AI, but we had broad remits, high ambition, and saw the opportunity to improve (and invent) so many customer experiences,” Jassy wrote.
There have been more than 27,000 job cuts at Amazon since 2022, with the most recent losses across its devices and services group and the books division. According to the memo, Amazon already has more than 1,000 AI services and apps that the company has either built or is in production, but that, Jassy notes, is just a “small fraction” of what it plans to launch in the near future.
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