While startups and smaller companies are taking to AI in a big way, even massive tech giants are predicting how AI will change their operations in the coming years.
Amazon has said that it expects its corporate workforce to shrink over the next few years owing to gains from AI. Amazon said that it was using AI in a big way internally, and was seeing encouraging results. The company hinted that this use of AI would lead to the company having fewer employees going forward.
“Today, in virtually every corner of the company, we’re using Generative AI to make customers lives better and easier,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a mail. ” Technologies like Generative AI are rare; they come about once-in-a-lifetime, and completely change what’s possible for customers and businesses. So, we are investing quite expansively, and, the progress we are making is evident,” he added.
“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. We’re going to lean in further in the coming months. We’re going to make it much easier to build agents, and then build (or partner) on several new agents across all of our business units and G&A areas,” he added.
Jassy hinted that this adoption of AI would lead to changes at the company. “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,” he said.
Amazon is now openly saying that many have been fearing over the last few years. While like other tech leaders, Jassy says that while some jobs will be replaced with AI and new jobs will be created, he does say that he expects that Amazon’s overall corporate workforce will be reduced because of AI gains. This implies that thus far, Amazon doesn’t see as many new jobs being created by AI as lost because of it. And if translates to other companies and sectors, it could lead to widespread job losses that society might find hard to navigate with the advent of advanced Artificial Intelligence.