Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, informed employees in a Tuesday memo that he expects the company “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we obtain efficiency gains from utilizing AI extensively across the company.”
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should alter the way our work is done. We will necessary fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote in the memo.
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The CEO declared that, while the company has already built more than 1,000 systems that leverage generative AI capabilities, what the company has deployed today represents “a tiny fraction of what [it] will ultimately build.” He anticipates Amazon will ramp up its efforts on agentic AI in the immediate near term.
Amazon has been bullish on its interest in utilizing AI for myriad functions, like demand forecasting, logistics management and customer service, so the fact that Jassy’s keen on the latest trfinish—agentic—isn’t a surprise. Agentic AI is trained to handle repeat tinquires, like creating invoices for suppliers, autonomously; it is also designed to assist human employees with decision creating. The idea is that, in the future, it will be able to handle more complicated tinquires, like autonomously reordering materials necessaryed to create a product if the originals obtain held up in shipping delays or nereceivediating prices with logistics carriers.
Jassy declared Amazon has plans to “build it much simpler to build agents, and then build (or partner) on several new agents” across its business units, which he expects to dramatically alter employees’ day-to-day work—and eventually, their lives.
Amazon’s own data displays that it employs more than 1.5 million people globally. As agents come into play, Jassy contfinished that wide-reaching workforce will contract.
Jassy advised employees to consider “how to obtain more done with scrappier teams” as Amazon continues to innovate with AI.
“Those who embrace this alter, become conversant in AI, assist us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and assist us reinvent the company,” he wrote.
Jassy is far from the first CEO to highlight the ways technology could shrink a workforce. In April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke expressed his enthusiasm for AI in an employee memo noting that teams should not expect to be able to hire unless they could actively prove AI couldn’t do the same job.
“Before inquireing for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot obtain what they want done utilizing AI,” Lütke wrote at the time. “What would this area see like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
And Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has been candid about his bullish stance on AI; last year, Klarna boasted that its AI-powered customer service bot, powered by OpenAI, had eliminated the necessary for 700 human workers, though those people were employed by a third party, not by the acquire now, pay later platform itself.
The company disclosed in its IPO filing that its workforce stood at about 3,400 employees at the finish of 2024, down more than 2,000 people from the finish of 2022. The company directly attributed that deflation to technology.
“The reduction in the number of full-time employees resulted from our strategic decision to reduce our overall headcount and drive operational efficiency by leveraging AI in our business and focutilizing on what really matters to our mission,” the company wrote in its IPO filing. “We expect the number of employees to continue to decrease in future periods.”
Those close to AI’s development state it has the power to significantly shift the economy—though not always for the better, despite all the discussion around efficiency improvements and margin increases. Late last month, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI development giant Anthropic, warned that it wouldn’t be out of the realm to see half of all white-collar, entest-level jobs eliminated becaapply of AI, per Axios. What’s more, he declared, one in five Americans could be out of a job within the next five becaapply of AI.
“It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t consider, are fully aware of what’s going on,” he informed CNN at the time.
To date, federal legislators have not passed any AI-related protections for workers. Amodei informed CNN that, in order to avert the most negative impacts of AI, stakeholders necessary to work toobtainher to prepare the workforce for technological alter—and decide how best to approach the collaboration between people and technology.
“We have to build sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that that we adopt the right the right policies… but we have to act now. We can’t just sleepwalk into it,” he reportedly declared.
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