Amazon CEO Says AI Will Reduce Its Corporate Workforce
In a June 17 message to employees, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy praised GenAI's potential to make customers lives better and easier. However, Jassy also acknowledged that as the technology weaves itself into virtually every corner of the company, it will also change the Amazon workforce.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote. “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 encouraged employees to educate themselves about the technology and “use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
He went on to write, “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, [who] help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”
In his annual letter to shareholders in April, Jassy already affirmed that AI will essentially touch every customer experience and enable new ones.
Amazon has rolled out Alexa+, its next-generation Alexa personal assistant, introduced “Lens” and “Buy for Me” shopping features, added Customer Service Chatbot with GenAI, and launched AI advertising tools.
The company is also using GenAI in its internal operations. In its fulfillment network, it’s using the technology to improve inventory placement and demand forecasting. Amazon’s Vision Assisted Sort Station (VASS) aims to help employees at delivery stations more efficiently identify and sort packages before they’re loaded onto delivery vans.
Plus, during Amazon’s recent Delivering the Future event, in Dortmund, Germany, the company introduced Vulcan, its first robot with a sense of touch — the ability to understand when and how it makes contact with an object, using key advances in engineering and physical AI.
"Today, we have over 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but at our scale, that’s a small fraction of what we will ultimately build," wrote Jassy in his June 17 message. "We’re going to lean in further in the coming months."
This article was first published on the site of sister brand Progressive Grocer.
