Is an AI employment disaster here? Amazon’s CEO doesn’t think so.
White-collar workers are worried. On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut nearly half the company, reducing its workforce from more than 10,000 to just under 6,000. Dorsey said on the company’s earnings call that more companies will continue to use AI to improve efficiency.
In a Friday interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he “doesn’t really understand” the news from Mr. Bullock. Still, he was thinking about the future of AI-powered work.
“I believe that many of the jobs that we’ve been putting humans through over the last 20, 30 years won’t require as many people doing the same job,” he said.
“I also think other jobs will be created. That’s always happened with every change in technology,” he added.
He gave the example of a cloud solutions architect. That job didn’t exist 15 years ago, he said. Now, that number is in the tens of thousands.
Jassy has previously suggested that AI would lead to white-collar job cuts at Amazon.
“We expect to reduce our overall workforce over the next few years as we drive efficiencies through the widespread use of AI across the company,” Amazon’s CEO said in a memo to employees in June. Business Insider previously reported that three internal Amazon Slack channels were ablaze with criticism from employees following the memo.
Large companies are not the only ones to reduce human resources in the AI era. For example, Vercel, an AI coding startup, reduced its sales team from 10 to one after training its agents to sell.
Jassy struck an optimistic tone in an interview Friday.
What new jobs will AI bring? It’s not clear yet. Some suggestions seem to have died down, such as the idea for an AI Prompt Engineer role. But AI has certainly increased demand for certain types of engineering roles and created new markets for training data.
In an interview, Mr. Jassy acknowledged that the business world is in a “period of transition.”
“We will all get through this together,” he said.
