Amazon CEO Jassy says AI will reduce its corporate workforce in the next few years

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo, people stand in the lobby for Amazon offices in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy anticipates generative artificial intelligence will reduce its corporate workforce in the next few years as the online giant begins to increase its usage of the technology.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in a message to employees. “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.”

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The executive said that Amazon has more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure is a “small fraction” of what it plans to build.

Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the e-commerce company’s AI plans.

“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,” he said.

Earlier this month Amazon announced that it was planning to invest US$10 billion toward building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about US$10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it ramps up its infrastructure to compete with other tech giants to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence products.

The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has meanwhile fueled demand for energy-hungry data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems. Amazon said earlier this month that it will spend US$20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania.

In March Amazon began testing artificial intelligence-aided dubbing for select movies and shows offered on its Prime streaming service. A month earlier, the company rolled out a generative-AI infused Alexa.

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Amazon has also invested more heavily in AI. In November the company said that it was investing an additional US$4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. Two months earlier chipmaker Intel said that its foundry business would make some custom artificial intelligence chips for Amazon Web Services, which is Amazon’s cloud computing unit and a main driver of its artificial intelligence ambitions.

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Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press