Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ominously warned Tuesday that he expects the rise of generative synthetic intelligence to “reduce” the corporate’s company workforce within the subsequent few years.
The Amazon boss, who changed Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, mentioned generative AI is a “once in a lifetime” expertise that “should change the way our work is done” as the corporate integrates it into its enterprise operations.
Consequently, Amazon will “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy mentioned in prolonged memo to staff that was additionally posted on the corporate’s web site.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, 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,” Jassy added.
Amazon had a company workforce of roughly 350,000 staff as December. Total, the corporate had greater than 1.5 million full-time and part-time staff on the finish of final yr, together with at its warehouse and achievement facilities.
Jassy mentioned Amazon already has greater than 1,000 generative AI companies or functions within the works, which is able to “small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”
Amazon’s stock administration, customer support chatbot and product pages are more likely to get an improve because of AI.
Staff ought to “be curious about AI” and take part in efforts to be taught “how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he added.
The remarks come as extra AI leaders name out the probability that developments in AI will shake up the labor market.
Final month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised alarms when he warned that executives and politicians ought to cease “sugar-coating” the mass layoffs that would happen in fields like tech, finance and regulation and be trustworthy with staff.
Amodei mentioned he expects important job losses within the subsequent one to 5 years, with US unemployment probably spiking to twenty%, up from its present degree of 4.2%.
In a dire state of affairs, AI may wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, he instructed.
Amazon isn’t the one firm more likely to expertise a serious workforce shakeup because of generative AI.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg not too long ago mentioned he expects AI to tackle an even bigger function inside Meta’s workforce.
“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg mentioned throughout an look on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned in April 2023 that he anticipated “knowledge workers,” reminiscent of writers, accountants, architects and software program engineers, to be in danger.
