The adoption of artificial intelligence systems throughout the business sector will lead to “fewer people doing some of the jobs” that become automated, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer this week.
Jassy’s understated comments about the future impacts of automation upon the job market were also optimistic: While he concedes that some people will be replaced by AI, the technology will simultaneously “make all of our jobs more interesting ” and lead to new roles.
“We’re going to hire more people in AI, more people in robotics, and there will be other jobs…that we’ll hire [for] over time, too,” he told Cramer.
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Such reassurances have become the norm among leaders of the major tech firms, as fears of AI-fueled job displacement continue to percolate.
In a blog post published last month, for example, OpenAI’s Sam Altman wrote that while AI will cause “whole classes of jobs” to disappear, this will ultimately be worthwhile thanks to the massive and widespread wealth the technology will supposedly generate. And in a recent episode of the podcast Hard Fork, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said the company has “no plan” to hire fewer engineers next year than it has this year.
The human cost
Like every other major tech company, Amazon has been investing heavily in AI. In February, the company unveiled Alexa+, its new AI-powered assistant. Last month, it announced the general launch of its Video Generator platform, which allows advertisers to create simple video ads from still images of products. And just last week, the company announced the launch of DeepFleet, a new foundation model designed to coordinate and streamline the behavior of its huge fleet of fulfillment center robots.
The company’s escalating embrace of AI comes with a human cost. Foreshadowing the statements he’d later make to CNBC, Jassy told Amazon employees in a memo last month that AI will make some of the company’s jobs redundant, while simultaneously creating more demand for human labor in certain job categories.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time,” Jassy wrote in the memo, “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.”
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Amazon has laid off around 27,000 workers since early 2022 as Jassy continues to look for ways to cut company expenditures, CNBC reported in May. Microsoft will also reportedly lay off around 4% of its global workforce — consisting of about 224,000 employees as of last month — as the company ratchets up its AI spending.
Agents ascendent
Jassy explicitly mentions AI agents in both the CNBC interview and his internal memo as a particularly potent application of AI.
Unlike more limited chatbots, agents are able to autonomously formulate plans, coordinate with one another, and use digital tools like web search in order to achieve their goals.
Also: What are AI agents? How to access a team of personalized assistants
Leading tech companies have been promoting agents with considerable gusto in recent months, an effort fueled in part by a need to show tangible returns to investors following massive investments in AI research and development. It seems to be working: A recent survey of 500 tech leaders conducted by accounting firm Ernst & Young found that close to half of all respondents are actively integrating AI agents across their organizations.
The same survey also found that 84% of tech leaders are planning on expanding their workforce over the next six months.
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