In a memo to employees extolling Amazon’s use of generative AI, CEO Andy Jassy also briefly noted that it may lead to a reduction in the company’s workforce.
“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. 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 wrote in the July 17 memo.
As of Dec. 2024, Amazon employed about 1,556,000 full-time and part-time staffers.
Despite the potential job reductions, the memo also encouraged employees to get excited about the use of AI, telling them to “be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, 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.”
Thus far, Amazon has more than “1,000 Generative AI services and applications in progress or built,” according to the memo. This includes building the next generation Alexa personal assistant, an Amazon AI shopping assistant, Amazon shopping features, including a lens that allows shoppers to take a photo of an item and pull it up on the website, as well as recommended size, and in AI tools for advertisers.
“While we’ve made a lot of progress, we’re still at the relative beginning. There are a few reasons we believe this and want to go even faster,” the memo reads.
Jassy went on to say that “AI agents will change how we all work and live,” and that there “will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field.” At Amazon, this will change the speed at which the company works and push the company to create new tools, he said.
“Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, 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,” the memo reads.
