"this will reduce our total corporate workforce"
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told staff to embrace artificial intelligence (AI), warning the technology will lead to a smaller corporate workforce.
In a memo sent to employees, Jassy encouraged workers to engage with the emerging technology.
He wrote: “Be curious about AI.”
Jassy predicted that AI would bring “efficiency gains” and reshape Amazon’s workforce over the next few years.
He said: “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 comments come amid growing concerns that widespread AI use could lead to mass job losses, particularly in white-collar sectors.
Amazon becomes the latest tech giant to set out its vision for how AI will transform internal operations.
The company employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide. While most staff work in logistics and warehouse roles, around 350,000 are office-based.
It is the second-largest private employer in the US after Walmart.
Jassy said Amazon is already using AI across “virtually every corner of the company”. He believes the technology will soon take over everyday tasks, including online shopping and daily chores.
He continued: “Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming and coming fast.”
Jassy added that employees who adapt to the shift will be “well-positioned” for future roles at the firm.
According to Jassy, around 500,000 sellers on Amazon are already using its AI tools to generate product descriptions. Advertisers are also increasingly adopting Amazon’s AI-powered services.
Major companies have accelerated investment in AI tools that can generate code, images and text with minimal input.
But as AI adoption grows, so do warnings about the consequences for employment.
Some experts say the impact could be more severe than previous industrial revolutions.
Last month, Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI company Anthropic, told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of AI research often dubbed the “Godfather of AI”, issued a similar warning on a recent podcast. He challenged the idea that new technologies always lead to more jobs in the long run.
Hinton said: “This is a very different kind of technology.
“If it can do all mundane human intellectual labour, then what new jobs is it going to create? You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it couldn’t just do.”
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