They've been saying this for years though. The AI agents will probably be the first to form a union for unfair worker practices.
Amazon is a leader in global trade. I really hate to see what the 'We shouldn't have did this' outcome looks like by adding AI to it. Might be good, might be bad.
> We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.
What he hopes for is to just reduce the number of people they employ. So the "more people doing other types of jobs" just makes the message more palatable.
Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?
This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.”
Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.
Wasn’t there a report from Salesforce a month ago where they found that agents were far less reliable and capable as hoped? May be different at Amazon, but who knows.
> 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.
I'm going to pick an arbitrary number here that's loosely based on top 100 tech companies by market cap.
If you are working for a company that employs at least 1000 full-time engineers, I think you should consider joining a team where every project involves AI in some way, if you aren't already on one. Whether its owning AI tooling, or developing client features that use AI directly, or even just prototyping AI concepts that never launch. The safest roles like research and directly working on the models are out of reach for most people due to competition and position scarcity, but that's ok. There are so many positions downstream from those. The key thing to look for is to be in a position where your AI features can actually turn a profit, which might be rare, but not as difficult to get as an upstream role. But its still fine to be in a role that isn't profitable.
I think AI-adjacent roles will either be the first or last fulltime SWE jobs to go during the next tech downturn, which I don't think we are in yet. I am betting on the latter, because I think corporations will continue to reroute more and more funding towards AI all the way down. Even if the current AI cycle ends up as a failure, we are already in the sunk cost stages of commitment. There is no turning back without anything short of a total collapse.
I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI and more to do with the revenue outlook or the growth outlook. Basically, they are "narrative shopping" to save face with the stock market... and IMO it might work.
Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
The Jassy "Thoughts on Gen AI" memo was released a month ago and this article doesn't seem to reveal any new information on this beyond just suggesting "amazon might soon reduce cost to serve" without providing any real information https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...
My gut feeling is, he is saying it to show dominance in AI (to show customers look, we are reducing our workforce, you can do it too! but to be frank, they have too many people doing nothing. so they can lay off as many people as they want). there isn't much out there. Systems are so fragile, management have no clue as they are far behind in understanding it.
I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit?
There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But we're in tech. There's always something new to do. If you're not doing new things as a company, you're getting replaced by those who are.
So it seems like a losing strategy to make your workforce cost reduction your primary concern when we could see the greatest workforce productivity gain in modern times.
I take more issue with the media spin than the actual story. Why does the discussion even mention software jobs when that's less than 4% of Amazon's workforce?
It makes more sense that Amazon would continue to push AI where it's already being used successfully. Devs may benefit from finding solutions quicker with AI, but it's never made sense to me why that would affect productivity per head or change hiring/firing rates.
Put another way: there are never enough devs and they write a lot of shitty code. AI writes even shittier code, but in subtly different ways and can write it even faster helping the dev iterate to better code.
The result is basically no change anywhere except a modest increase in quality. This is equivalent to, but cheaper than going on an epic quest to find the good devs and overpay them. Why is this a bad thing for like 99% of people who write code? There's basically no impact on their pay or ease of finding a job.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 51.6 ms ] threadAmazon is a leader in global trade. I really hate to see what the 'We shouldn't have did this' outcome looks like by adding AI to it. Might be good, might be bad.
What he hopes for is to just reduce the number of people they employ. So the "more people doing other types of jobs" just makes the message more palatable.
Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?
Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.
So glad I left that place.
CEOs can warn about AI replacing jobs until they're blue in the face, but people won't listen.
And when mass job losses finally arrive, people (including the CEOs) will be shocked and overwhelmed.
> 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.
If you are working for a company that employs at least 1000 full-time engineers, I think you should consider joining a team where every project involves AI in some way, if you aren't already on one. Whether its owning AI tooling, or developing client features that use AI directly, or even just prototyping AI concepts that never launch. The safest roles like research and directly working on the models are out of reach for most people due to competition and position scarcity, but that's ok. There are so many positions downstream from those. The key thing to look for is to be in a position where your AI features can actually turn a profit, which might be rare, but not as difficult to get as an upstream role. But its still fine to be in a role that isn't profitable.
I think AI-adjacent roles will either be the first or last fulltime SWE jobs to go during the next tech downturn, which I don't think we are in yet. I am betting on the latter, because I think corporations will continue to reroute more and more funding towards AI all the way down. Even if the current AI cycle ends up as a failure, we are already in the sunk cost stages of commitment. There is no turning back without anything short of a total collapse.
Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But we're in tech. There's always something new to do. If you're not doing new things as a company, you're getting replaced by those who are.
So it seems like a losing strategy to make your workforce cost reduction your primary concern when we could see the greatest workforce productivity gain in modern times.
It makes more sense that Amazon would continue to push AI where it's already being used successfully. Devs may benefit from finding solutions quicker with AI, but it's never made sense to me why that would affect productivity per head or change hiring/firing rates.
Put another way: there are never enough devs and they write a lot of shitty code. AI writes even shittier code, but in subtly different ways and can write it even faster helping the dev iterate to better code.
The result is basically no change anywhere except a modest increase in quality. This is equivalent to, but cheaper than going on an epic quest to find the good devs and overpay them. Why is this a bad thing for like 99% of people who write code? There's basically no impact on their pay or ease of finding a job.