Amazon boss Andy Jassy has told staff to embrace artificial intelligence (AI), warning that technology will lead to fewer corporate workers in the coming years.
He shared his predictions with staff in a memo on Tuesday, urging employees to “be interested in AI.”
Tech Giant is the latest company to plan to use AI amid concerns that technology will lead to rapid unemployment around the world.
Jassy said he hopes AI will lead to “increasing efficiency” that will allow businesses to reduce their workforce.
“There are fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and there are more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote.
“It will be difficult to know exactly where this is online over time, but over the next few years, this is expected to reduce the total workforce of businesses.
In particular, companies in the technology sector have invested heavily in AI in recent years, spurring technological advances that have made chatbots easier than ever to create code, images and text with limited instruction.
But as new tools gained traction, they sparked warnings from technology leaders of job losses, especially in entry-level office roles.
Last month, AI-Firm Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told news website Axios that the technology can wipe out half of the entry-level white-collar work.
Geoffrey Hinton has earned him the moniker “Godfather of AI” and reflected those warnings on his recent podcast.
“This is a very different kind of technology,” he says, in a pattern seen in previous technological leap, opposed to the argument that unemployment from AI will rise as technology creates new kinds of positions.
“If you can do all the ordinary human intellectual labor, what new work will it create? You will have to be very skilled to do the work that you cannot.”
Amazon directly employed over 1.5 million people worldwide at the end of last year.
Most of these staff are in the United States. It ranks there as the second largest employer after Walmart.
Many staff serve as the company's e-commerce warehouse, but around 350,000 people serve the company in office roles.
In his note, Jassy said Amazon uses AI in “almost every corner of the company,” and hoped that technology would eventually perform routine tasks such as shopping and daily chores.
“Many of these agents have not been built yet, but they are definitely coming quickly,” he wrote, noting that staff who accepted such changes were “good location” in the company.
He said that half a million sellers on the platform are already using the company's AI tools to create information about their products, while advertisers are also adopting AI offerings.
