Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed staffers that they should anticipate potential layoffs across the company as they expedite the implementation of artificial intelligence in an effort to boost and/or improve the customer experience.
“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,” Jassy wrote in a message to employees on Tuesday. “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.”
The potential layoffs could impact many across Amazon’s workforce, which consists of about 1,556,000 full-time and part-time staffers globally. Jassy mentioned that Amazon now has over 1,000 Generative AI services and applications in progress, adding that the amount is just a small fraction of what the company would ideally like to build.
While noting that Amazon has already shifted into an AI-leaning model, highlighting its rollout of Alexa+ and the use of its AI shopping assistant, Jassy further encouraged workers to become “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,” Jassy, who started at Amazon in 1997 as an Assistant Product Manager, wrote.
For now, he shared that Amazon has only scratched the surface in its heavy pivot to AI-powered tools and resources, but added that he believes the technology will “change how we all work and live.”
“Agents let you tell them what you want (often in natural language), and do things like scour the web (and various data sources) and summarize results, engage in deep research, write code, find anomalies, highlight interesting insights, translate language and code into other variants, and automate a lot of tasks that consume our time,” his message continued. “There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field. There will also be agents that routinely do things for you outside of work, from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks. Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.”
Lastly, the executive shared that he’s excited about the future of AI at the company and that he hopes his staff will take part in its journey.
“There’s so much more to come with Generative AI,” Jassy concluded. “I’m energized by our progress, excited about our plans ahead and looking forward to partnering with you all as we change what’s possible for our customers, partners and how we work.”
