Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ominously warned Tuesday that he expects the rise of generative artificial intelligence to “reduce” the company’s corporate workforce in the next few years.
The Amazon boss, who replaced Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, said generative AI is a “once in a lifetime” technology that “should change the way our work is done” as the company integrates it into its business operations.
As a result, Amazon will “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in lengthy memo to employees that was also posted on the company’s website.
“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,” Jassy added.
Amazon had a corporate workforce of approximately 350,000 employees as December. Overall, the company had more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time employees at the end of last year, including at its warehouse and fulfillment centers.
Jassy said Amazon already has more than 1,000 generative AI services or applications in the works, which will “small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”
Amazon’s inventory management, customer service chatbot and product pages are likely to get an upgrade as a result of AI.
Employees should “be curious about AI” and participate in efforts to learn “how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he added.
The remarks come as more AI leaders call out the likelihood that advancements in AI will shake up the labor market.
Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised alarms when he warned that executives and politicians should stop “sugar-coating” the mass layoffs that could occur in fields like tech, finance and law and be honest with workers.
Amodei said he expects significant job losses in the next one to five years, with US unemployment potentially spiking to 20%, up from its current level of 4.2%.
In a dire scenario, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, he suggested.
Amazon isn’t the only company likely to experience a major workforce shakeup as a result of generative AI.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg recently said he expects AI to take on a bigger role within Meta’s workforce.
“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned in April 2023 that he expected “knowledge workers,” such as writers, accountants, architects and software engineers, to be at risk.
