Natalie Sherman
Business reporter, BBC News
Amazon boss Andy Jassy has told staff to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and warned the technology will lead to a smaller corporate workforce in the next few years.
He shared the prediction in a memo to staff on Tuesday, which urged employees to “be curious about AI”.
The tech giant is the latest firm to set out its plans for using AI amid concerns the technology will lead to rapid job losses across the world.
Mr Jassy said he expected AI to lead to “efficiency gains” that would allow the firm to reduce its corporate 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.”
Companies, especially in the tech sector, have been investing heavily in AI in recent years, spurred on by technological advances that have made it easier than ever for chatbots to create code, images and text with limited instruction.
But as the new tools gain traction, they have sparked warnings from some tech leaders of job losses, especially in entry-level office roles.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI-firm Anthropic, told news website Axios last month that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white collar jobs.
Geoffrey Hinton, whose work on AI, including at Google, has earned him the moniker “Godfather of AI”, echoed those warnings on a recent podcast.
“This is a very different kind of technology,” he said, pushing back against arguments that job losses from AI will be outweighed as the technology creates new kinds of positions, in a pattern seen with earlier technological leaps.
“If it can do all mundane human intellectual labor, then what new jobs is it going to create? You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it couldn’t just do.”
Amazon directly employed more than 1.5 million people around the world at the end of last year.
The majority of those staff are in the US, where it ranks as the country’s second-largest employer after Walmart.
While many staff the firm’s e-commerce warehouses, about 350,000 people also serve the company in office roles.
In his memo, Mr Jassy said Amazon was using AI in “virtually every corner of the company” and he expected the technology to eventually perform routine tasks, such as shopping and daily chores.
“Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming and coming fast,” he wrote, saying staff who embraced such changes would be “well-positioned” at the company.
He said half a million of the sellers on its platforms were already using the company’s AI tools to create information about their products, while advertisers were also adopting its AI offerings.
