Amazon Preps Employees for Layoffs by Talking Up the Power of AI Agents

Amazon seems to be gently lane its next series of layoffs. In a Message to employees Shared on Tuesday, the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, ​​greatly talked about the adoption by the company of artificial intelligence tools in all its business, and said that it “would ultimately reduce our total workforce of the company as we obtain efficiency gains” over time. It is only slightly veiled companies that speak to “prepare to be replaced”.

Jassy has described generative a “unique alive” technology that will change the operation of the company, and said that Amazon was already using it in “almost all corners of the company”. According to Jassy, ​​Amazon already has more than 1,000 services and applications generating IA in progress or built, and said: “This is a small fraction of what we are going to build.” It is therefore clear that the company is entirely on AI. Amazon previously said that this would be committed $ 100 billion to invest in AI technologies This year.

As for humans? Well, it seems that Amazon is not so attached to them in the long term. Jassy told 1.5 million employees of the company that the generator “will change the way our work was finished” and said that the company “would ultimately need fewer people who make jobs that are finished today, and more people who make other types of jobs”.

The underlying message: you could soon be without work. “It is difficult to know exactly where it takes place over time, but in the coming years, we expect this to reduce our total workforce as we get efficiency gains by largely using AI throughout the business,” Jassy wrote.

The CEO has offered his workers, some of whom probably wonder how much they will be employed, how to potentially survive the next layoff cycle (or, perhaps more likely, help to train their future replacements). “As we cross this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take training, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in the brainstorms of your team to understand how to invent our customers faster and wide, and how to do more with the Scrappier teams.”

Amazon was going beyond its workforce to the bone in the departments which seem to worry less. Business Cut around 100 people of his team of devices and services earlier this year, and about the same number of his book department. By CNBCHe has dismissed around 27,000 people since 2022 and has his eyes on other cuts.

It is difficult to watch Jassy’s Ai-Forward message as many other than more layoffs are approaching. It is possible that IA’s media threw is just a cynical attempt to position itself as a leader in the industry when the real objective is to reduce wages to increase the share price. It would not be the first company to try to go all on AI at the expense of human labor. Earlier this year, Klarna announced that she was Bringing representatives of human customer service back After trying to leave the task at AI after finding that the results are not great and people don’t really like to face the AI ​​agents.