Is the AI job-pocalypse here? Amazon’s CEO doesn’t think so.
White-collar workers are worried. On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut nearly half the company, bringing its staff of over 10,000 down to just under 6,000. On the company’s earnings call, Dorsey said that more companies would follow by using AI for efficiency gains.
In a Friday interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that he hadn’t “really digested” the news from Block. Still, he had thoughts on the future of work with AI.
“I do believe that a lot of the jobs that we’ve thrown human beings at for the last 20 or 30 years, you won’t need as many human beings doing those same jobs,” he said.
“I also think there are going to be other jobs created, and that has always happened in every technology shift,” he added.
He gave the example of the cloud solutions architect. That job didn’t exist 15 years ago, he said; now, there are tens of thousands of them.
Jassy has previously signaled AI would lead to white-collar job cuts at Amazon.
In a June memo to employees, the Amazon CEO wrote that “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.” In the wake of the memo, three internal Amazon Slack channels lit up with criticism from employees, Business Insider previously reported.
It’s not just larger companies trimming staff in the AI era. Take the AI coding startup Vercel, for example, which trained an agent to do sales and then cut its 10-person sales team down to one.
Jassy struck an optimistic tone in his Friday interview.
What new jobs will AI bring? It’s not yet clear. Some proposals — like the idea of the role of an AI prompt engineer — seem to have fizzled out. But AI has certainly driven higher demand for specific types of engineering roles and created a new market for training data.
Jassy acknowledged that the business world was going through a “transition” period in the interview.
“We’ll all work through it together,” he said.
