Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, told employees in a Tuesday memo that he expects the company “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
“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,” Jassy wrote in the memo.
The CEO said that, while the company has already built more than 1,000 systems that leverage generative AI capabilities, what the company has deployed today represents “a small fraction of what [it] will ultimately build.” He anticipates Amazon will ramp up its efforts on agentic AI in the immediate near term.
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Amazon has been bullish on its interest in using AI for myriad functions, like demand forecasting, logistics management and customer service, so the fact that Jassy’s keen on the latest trend—agentic—isn’t a surprise. Agentic AI is trained to handle repeat tasks, like creating invoices for suppliers, autonomously; it is also designed to help human employees with decision making. The idea is that, in the future, it will be able to handle more complicated tasks, like autonomously reordering materials needed to create a product if the originals get held up in shipping delays or negotiating prices with logistics carriers.
Jassy said Amazon has plans to “make it much easier to build agents, and then build (or partner) on several new agents” across its business units, which he expects to dramatically alter employees’ day-to-day work—and eventually, their lives.
Amazon’s own data shows that it employs more than 1.5 million people globally. As agents come into play, Jassy contended that wide-reaching workforce will contract.
Jassy advised employees to consider “how to get more done with scrappier teams” as Amazon continues to innovate with AI.
“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,” he wrote.
Jassy is far from the first CEO to highlight the ways technology could shrink a workforce. In April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke expressed his enthusiasm for AI in an employee memo noting that teams should not expect to be able to hire unless they could actively prove AI couldn’t do the same job.
“Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Lütke wrote at the time. “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
And Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has been candid about his bullish stance on AI; last year, Klarna boasted that its AI-powered customer service bot, powered by OpenAI, had eliminated the need for 700 human workers, though those people were employed by a third party, not by the buy now, pay later platform itself.
The company disclosed in its IPO filing that its workforce stood at about 3,400 employees at the end of 2024, down more than 2,000 people from the end of 2022. The company directly attributed that deflation to technology.
“The reduction in the number of full-time employees resulted from our strategic decision to reduce our overall headcount and drive operational efficiency by leveraging AI in our business and focusing on what really matters to our mission,” the company wrote in its IPO filing. “We expect the number of employees to continue to decrease in future periods.”
Those close to AI’s development say it has the power to significantly shift the economy—though not always for the better, despite all the discussion around efficiency improvements and margin increases. Late last month, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI development giant Anthropic, warned that it wouldn’t be out of the realm to see half of all white-collar, entry-level jobs eliminated because of AI, per Axios. What’s more, he said, one in five Americans could be out of a job within the next five because of AI.
“It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t think, are fully aware of what’s going on,” he told CNN at the time.
To date, federal legislators have not passed any AI-related protections for workers. Amodei told CNN that, in order to avert the most negative impacts of AI, stakeholders need to work together to prepare the workforce for technological change—and decide how best to approach the collaboration between people and technology.
“We have to make sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that that we adopt the right the right policies… but we have to act now. We can’t just sleepwalk into it,” he reportedly said.
