Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's ‘message' to employees: Make no mistake, they're coming, and they're …
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
delivered a stark warning to his 1.5 million employees this week, telling them that artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape the company's workforce in the coming years. In a company-wide memo, Jassy announced that AI agents and
generative AI
systems will reduce the need for human workers in many current roles.
"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today," Jassy wrote in the June 17 memo, adding that the company expects this transformation "will reduce our total corporate workforce" within the next few years. The announcement affects Amazon's 350,000 corporate employees working in software engineering, marketing, and other white-collar positions.
Jassy painted a future dominated by AI agents, autonomous software systems that can perform complex tasks like research, coding, and automation. Jassy predicted there will be "billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field," handling everything from shopping to travel to daily chores.
CEO's "fewer people" message targets Amazon's corporate workforce
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Jassy highlighted the company's extensive AI integration, citing over 1,000 generative AI services and applications currently in development or deployed. These range from the next-generation Alexa+ personal assistant to AI-powered shopping tools used by tens of millions of customers worldwide. The company has also rebuilt its customer service chatbot with generative AI and implemented AI across its fulfillment network for inventory management and demand forecasting.
Despite the job displacement warning, Jassy framed the changes as an opportunity for employees willing to adapt. He urged workers to "be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings," emphasizing that those who embrace the technology will be "well-positioned to have high impact."
Read: Amazon CEO's full address to employees
Today, in virtually every corner of the company, we're using Generative AI to make customers lives better and easier. What started as deep conviction that every customer experience would be reinvented using AI, and that altogether new experiences we've only dreamed of would become possible, is rapidly becoming reality. 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.
You can see it in what we're rolling out in Alexa+, our next generation
Alexa
personal assistant that's meaningfully smarter, more capable, and is the first personal assistant that can take significant actions for customers on top of providing intelligent answers to virtually any question.
You can see it with our AI shopping assistant that's being used by tens of millions of customers around the world to discover new products and make more informed purchase decisions.
You can see it in an increasing array of shopping features like "Lens" (very cool to be able to take a picture of an item and have it pull up the shopping result), "Buy for Me" (where I can ask our shopping agent to buy an item on another merchant's website for me), or Recommended Size (where we can predict the right size for you based on prior purchases and how different apparel brands run fit-wise relative to each other).
You can see it in how we're helping our independent sellers more easily create new product detail pages or get advice on how to be even more effective as a seller in our marketplace. Nearly half a million selling partners are using these services, and the listings they're creating are measurably better.
You can see it in Advertising where we've built a suite of AI tools that make it easier for brands to plan, onboard, create and optimize campaigns. In Q1 alone, over 50K advertisers used these capabilities.
And, you can see it in what we're delivering in AWS for builders, whether it's custom silicon (Trainium2) to provide better price-performance on model-training and inference, services that make it much easier to build Foundation Models (SageMaker), or leverage leading frontier models and do GenAI inference at scale (Bedrock), our own frontier model (Nova) to give customers leading intelligence at lower latency and cost, or services to make it much easier for developers to write code (Q and QCLI).
We're also using Generative AI broadly across our internal operations. In our fulfillment network, we're using AI to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots—all of which have improved cost to serve and delivery speed. We've rebuilt our Customer Service Chatbot with GenAI, providing an even better experience than we'd had before. And, we're assembling more intelligent and compelling product detail pages from leveraging GenAI.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
While we've made a lot of progress, we're still at the relative beginning. There are a few reasons we believe this and want to go even faster.
First, we have strong conviction that AI agents will change how we all work and live. Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems. Agents let you tell them what you want (often in natural language), and do things like scour the web (and various data sources) and summarize results, engage in deep research, write code, find anomalies, highlight interesting insights, translate language and code into other variants, and automate a lot of tasks that consume our time. There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field. There will also be agents that routinely do things for you outside of work, from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks. Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they're coming, and coming fast.
Second, and what makes this agentic future so compelling for Amazon, is that these agents are going to change the scope and speed at which we can innovate for customers. Agents will allow us to start almost everything from a more advanced starting point. We'll be able to focus less on rote work and more on thinking strategically about how to improve customer experiences and invent new ones. Agents will be teammates that we can call on at various stages of our work, and that will get wiser and more helpful with more experience. If we build and leverage the right agents, it's going to rapidly accelerate our ability to make customers lives easier and better every day, and it's going to make our jobs even more exciting and fun than they are today.
And third, we're going to keep pushing to operate like the world's largest start-up-- customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy, and full of missionaries trying to build something better for customers and a business that outlasts us all. You will continue to see steam and I take actions to help us move faster, have more ownership, and invent more easily. AI will be a substantial catalyst here.
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.
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.
As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team's brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams. When I first started at Amazon in 1997 as an Assistant Product Manager, I worked on leaner teams that got a lot done quickly and where I could have substantial impact. We didn't have tools resembling anything like Generative AI, but we had broad remits, high ambition, and saw the opportunity to improve (and invent) so many customer experiences. Fast forward 28 years and the most transformative technology since the Internet is here. 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.
There's so much more to come with Generative AI. I'm energized by our progress, excited about our plans ahead, and looking forward to partnering with you all as we change what's possible for our customers, partners, and how we work.
Andy
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