Amazon's CEO envisions the “future of agents” in which AI robots or agents replace people working in the company's office.
In a memo to employees published by Amazon on Tuesday, CEO Andy Jassy said he hopes to cut down the company's workforce in the coming years as he leaps heavily towards generative AI tools to fulfill his workplace duties.
“As we deploy more generative AI and agents, it should change the way we work,” Jassy said. “There are fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people are doing other types of work.”
Jassy added that the move towards AI will “finally reduce the corporate workforce as more efficiency is gained through the use of AI across the company.” With around 1.5 million employees worldwide, the e-commerce giant is the second-largest private employer in the United States.
An Amazon spokesperson reached out for a comment that he had postponed to the original memo.
Amazon's stock fell slightly on Tuesday, falling 0.4% as of 3:45pm.
Amazon is investing in AI “very extensively”
According to Jassy, Amazon has “an extremely extensive investment” in generative AI technology, adding that “the progress we are making is clear.”
“Many of these agents have not been built yet, but they're definitely coming and coming quickly,” the CEO said in a note.
Amazon has stepped up its participation in the Generated AI Arm Race with the release of the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker in 2014. This is the first product that includes virtual assistant Alexa. In February this year, the company announced that it would be unveiling Alexa+, a new version of its “more conversational, smarter, and personalized” AI-powered voice assistant.
The AI features have since been built into Amazon's e-commerce website via tools such as “Buy for Me.” Amazon's According to Jassy, AI shopping assistants are used by tens of millions of customers.
AI replaces creativity for some people
In Tuesday's note, Jassy sketched out the future where AI agents are used to carry out boring tasks and freed human workers to take on more creative roles.
“An agent allows you to start almost everything from a more sophisticated starting point,” says Jassy. “We can't concentrate much on the memorization task, strategically thinking about how to improve the customer experience and invent something new.”
However, this hard pivot to AI is generating negative feedback from the company's white-collar employees. An Amazon software engineer recently interviewed by the New York Times, encouraged to use AI to increase productivity, achieve higher output goals, and make work “more routine, thoughtful, and decisively, much faster pace.”
Jassy said Amazon currently has a “minority” of what Amazon currently has 1,000 generative AI services and applications that are ultimately built.
Jassy's pledge to invest in AI came after it announced in May that it would cut 100 jobs on devices and service units, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed.
