Amazon CEO says it will cut jobs due to AI’s ‘efficiency’

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says advancements successful AI volition “reduce” the company’s firm headcount implicit the adjacent fewer years. In a memo to employees connected Tuesday, Jassy writes that Amazon expects the alteration owed to “efficiency gains from utilizing AI extensively crossed the company,” without specifying however galore employees would beryllium affected.

“As we rotation retired much Generative AI and agents, it should alteration the mode our enactment is done,” Jassy says. “We volition request less radical doing immoderate of the jobs that are being done today, and much radical doing different types of jobs.”

Amazon has laid off much than 27,000 people since 2022, and astir precocious chopped jobs across its devices and services group and its books division. Jassy notes that Amazon has much than 1,000 AI services and apps that the institution is moving connected oregon has already built, saying that it’s conscionable a “small fraction” of what it’s readying to motorboat successful the future.

He notes that workers should besides “be funny astir AI” and however to usage it to “get much done with scrappier teams:

Those who clasp this change, go conversant successful AI, assistance america physique and amended our AI capabilities internally and present for customers, volition beryllium well-positioned to person precocious interaction and assistance america reinvent the company.

Other companies person shared statements astir however they expect AI to interaction their workforce arsenic well. In April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told employees asking for much headcount oregon resources that they should explicate wherefore they “cannot get what they privation done utilizing AI.” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn besides stated that the institution plans on replacing declaration workers with AI arsenic portion of a caller “AI-first” approach.