Amazon boss Andy Jassy has told staff to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and warned the technology will lead to a smaller corporate workforce in the next few years.
On Tuesday, in a memo to employees, he made the prediction and encouraged them to "be curious about AI." The tech giant is the latest to announce plans to use AI, raising concerns that the technology will cause rapid job losses worldwide. Mr Jassy said he expected AI to lead to "efficiency gains" that would allow the firm to reduce its corporate workforce.
He wrote, "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are done now, and more people doing other kinds of jobs." "We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce in the next few years as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," although "it's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time." Due to technological advancements that have made it easier than ever for chatbots to create code, images, and text with minimal instruction, businesses, particularly those in the technology sector, have been making significant investments in AI in recent years. However, as the new tools gain traction, some tech leaders have expressed concern about job losses, particularly in entry-level office positions. Last month, Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, told the news website Axios that the technology could eliminate half of the entry-level white collar jobs. On a recent podcast, Geoffrey Hinton, whose work on AI, including at Google, has earned him the moniker "Godfather of AI," reiterated those cautions. "This is a very different kind of technology," he said, pushing back against arguments that job losses from AI will be outweighed as the technology creates new kinds of positions, in a pattern seen with earlier technological leaps.
"If it can do all mundane human intellectual labor, then what new jobs is it going to create? To do a job that it couldn't do, you'd need a lot of skill." At the end of last year, Amazon directly employed more than 1.5 million individuals worldwide. The majority of those staff are in the US, where it ranks as the country's second-largest employer after Walmart.
While many staff the firm's e-commerce warehouses, about 350,000 people also serve the company in office roles.
Amazon using AI in 'every corner of company'
Mr. Jassy stated in his memo that Amazon was utilizing AI in "virtually every corner of the company" and that he anticipated that the technology would eventually perform routine tasks like shopping and daily tasks. He wrote, "Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they are coming and coming fast," claiming that employees who accepted such shifts would be "well-positioned" at the business. He stated that advertisers were also adopting the company's AI offerings and that half a million sellers on its platforms were already using the company's AI tools to create product information.
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