Amazon’s Jassy Says AI Skills Will ‘Reinvent’ a Smaller Company

Employees who have learned how to use artificial intelligence (AI) will be better positioned to be a part of Amazon in the future, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a message shared with employees Tuesday (June 17).

Jassy added that Amazon’s total corporate workforce is likely to shrink over the next few years as the company adopts AI, which he said is the most transformative technology to come along since the internet.

“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,” Jassy said in the message.

Jassy suggested that employees be curious about AI, educate themselves about it, use it wherever they can, and participate in their team’s brainstorming sessions about how to use the technology to get more done.

Amazon has already deployed AI in its Alexa+ personal assistant, AI shopping assistant, shopping features, independent seller services, advertising tools, coding tools and across its internal operations, Jassy said.

Still, “we’re at the very beginning,” Jassy said, adding that Amazon expects that AI agents will change how people live and work and that the technology will play a significant role in the company’s efforts to “operate like the world’s largest start-up.”

Amazon currently has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications built or in progress, and expects to build many more than that, Jassy said.

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy said in the message to employees. “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.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Workers Say Fears About GenAI Taking Their Jobs is Overblown,” found that 54% of workers said that generative AI posed a “significant risk of widespread job displacement” and that 38% feared the technology could eventually lead to the elimination of their specific jobs.

It was reported in May 2024 that tech workers were scrambling to add AI capabilities to their resumes as tech companies were trying to reposition themselves as AI firms.