“We continue to hire software development professionals as well. AI won’t necessarily take those jobs away,” one CEO of a solution provider partnering with AWS told CRN, adding that they can now do more customer-facing and business-facing tasks, rather than spending hours writing code or working on internal technical work that AI can do in seconds if configured properly.
Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, is adamant that AI will not take away jobs. In fact, Amazon is currently hiring 11,000 new software engineering interns and early career employees, he says.
“Is AI killing jobs? In fact, I’m seeing the exact opposite,” Garman, CEO of the world’s largest cloud company and AI innovator, said on stage at Amazon’s “What’s Next” event this week.
“When we talked to companies here in the Bay Area and teams at Amazon, they realized they could actually attract SDE. [software development engineers]. And when developers come in for job interviews, they want to know, “Do I have access to the absolute latest development tools?” Will we be able to use Kiro and Claude Code?” said Garman of AWS.
Garman said Amazon is currently hiring 11,000 new software development engineering interns and early career full-time employees.
“We’re not going to lose jobs, right?” he said, referring to the 11,000 jobs.
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“I can tell you that we’re hiring as many software developers as we’ve ever hired inside Amazon,” Garman said.
Seattle-based Amazon confirmed to CRN that it expects to have more than 11,000 interns and early-career full-time SDEs onboard the company by 2026 worldwide.
Garman: Some developer skills may be ‘low value’
The AWS CEO said it’s true that some IT expertise in specific skills that AI itself might be able to do becomes less valuable.
“It could potentially be true that being an expert at writing Java code snippets may be less valuable in the future than it was a few years ago,” he said.
“But understanding how to create applications, understanding how to solve customer problems, and thinking about technology and how all the pieces fit together is more valuable than ever,” Garman says.
For example, Garman said the company is considering using AI to help salespeople perform their daily tasks so they can spend more time with customers.
“If you’re a salesperson, we’re thinking, ‘How can we use AI and agents to automate more parts?’ [So] “How can we effectively bring opportunities into Salesforce, instead of freeing up our sales reps’ time to spend more time interacting with customers, supporting them, and explaining how they can get value from the cloud?” said Garman.
AWS CEO says jobs won’t be ‘disappeared’ due to AI
One CEO of a solution provider partnering with AWS agreed with Garman’s assessment that AI will not be a “job killer” for technology jobs.
“We understand what he’s saying because our own employees feel the same way.” [in North America]we won’t fire people because of AI. We give them AI tools so they don’t have to do anything that isn’t high-level and don’t have to do a lot of internal stuff that customers don’t care about,” said the anonymous CEO.
“We still employ software development professionals as well. AI isn’t necessarily taking those jobs away. They are now able to do more customer-facing and business-facing work, rather than spending hours writing code or working on internal technical things that AI could do in seconds if configured properly for them.”
Overall, Garman said, jobs will not disappear because of AI.
But AI will change the way employees do their daily work.
“I think the nature of all jobs is going to change. But it’s not going to eliminate jobs. It’s just that there’s going to be more high-value work available,” he says.
