Amazon is warning its employees that artificial intelligence will lead the company to have a smaller workforce in the future.
In a message to employees shared on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussed how efficiency improvements from AI would likely lead to a downsizing of the human workforce.
“With the implementation of more Generative AI and agents, our work processes will transform. We will need fewer individuals for certain roles that exist today, while there will be an increased need for people in different kinds of roles,” he stated.
“It’s challenging to predict the exact outcome over time, but in the coming years, we anticipate a decrease in our overall corporate workforce as the extensive application of AI across the company brings about efficiency improvements,” Jassy mentioned.
But AI would not just effect change at Amazon, he added.
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 comes after increased warnings from the tech industry about AI’s effect on white collar jobs.
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In May, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei warned on CNN that the technology would trigger a spike in unemployment, and that it would happen sooner than unprepared political leaders and businesses expected.
AI, including tools Anthropic itself is building, could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and boost unemployment to as much as 20 per cent 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 was having on hiring and jobs currently was 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 was likely driven by economic uncertainty.
