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Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce
- vpShane 1y agoThey'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.
- leptons 1y agoThey will scrap it as soon as "AI" "hallucinates" Amazon into an embarrassing loss or problem somewhere that didn't have to happen.
- rwmj 1y agoHave you bought anything from Amazon? They have no issues with flushing their reputation down the toilet, as long as it makes or saves money.
- leptons 1y agoEver hear the phrase "buyer beware"? It's been around for thousands of years.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI don't know what tools will be used at Amazon but I know who will be asked to fix it in the next three years after a major failure
- nullorempty 1y ago> 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?
- gruez 1y ago>Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap? There's no way that paying for a bunch of employees that you don't need, just so you can have some customers, is going to make sense. Even if you're operating a company town, only a fraction of their income is going to be spent on your company's goods/services, so you'll never be able to recoup the wage that way.
- arnonejoe 1y agoI think what he is trying to say is if there is mass unemployment as a result of "all companies following suit", no one will be able to buy their products.
- satyrun 1y agoBlue collar workers won't have this problem for a very long time. It seems obvious that many white collar workers today will have to do something involving physical labor at some point in the future. I expect I will be facing this in my mid 50s. Really not ideal timing.
- drewbeck 1y agoMaybe not with AI, but blue collar workers suffered in the same way bc of job flight and automation in decades past.
- ITB 1y agoCapitalism is the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It will work out.
- nullorempty 1y agoMore a pursuit of short term profit I'd think.
- vajrabum 1y ago
- throwawayoldie 1y ago"We're doing layoffs, and here's this years pretext."
- linotype 1y agoIs there a way we can filter these kinds of articles out? It's becoming tiring. Maybe I should start using the API and an LLM to filter.
- CharlesW 1y agoDefinitely do a "Show HN" once you've done that.
- JCM9 1y agoThis 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.
- zdragnar 1y agoIt definitely has the "thought leader" vibe that most fluff pieces from C level types have.
- supertrope 1y agoThe AI craze has shown that most businesses leaders blindly follow buzzwords.
- readthenotes1 1y agoAnthropic is way behind? That might surprise a few people. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-considers-another-multibillion-dollar-investment-anthropic-ft-reports-2025-07-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-cons...
- JCM9 1y agoAmazon is just one of many investors in Anthropic.
- paulddraper 1y agoComment was about $AMZN Fraction of that is Anthropic investment.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> and the story isn’t sticking with folks. This take is getting old, and the story won't stick with folks till their desk is in a cardboard box... Out of all the faangs, amz is the best positioned to remove staff and agentify the work they were doing. First, amz constantly churns the lower x%. They've been doing this for years now. They know what to count and who to fire. Second, amz has had everyone write a story about everything they do, day in, day out for years now. Change a lightbulb? Not without a story. Guess what you need for training LLMs? Yup, stories. There are plenty of people writing stories and coordinating the writing of other stories. Those people will be the first out. It's never the top nor the bottom.
- jihadjihad 1y agoWasn’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.
- rvz 1y agoNeed a strong citation for this one. But would they ever admit such a failure in-front of shareholders who are still under the spell of "AI agents", "AGI", "ASI" bullshit? I don't think so.
- simonw 1y agoThat was this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18878 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18878 Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289554
- lbrito 1y agoJassy is the prototypical Amhole. Always with a good zeitgesity excuse for screwing the workforce. So glad I left that place.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sandspar 1y agoOne thing I learned from COVID is that warnings never stick + once the wave hits it's MUCH larger than even the most dire warnings predicted. 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.
- pmg102 1y agoThat was true for COVID but be careful not to overgeneralise. People also have historically warned about many things, with many of them never coming true. In fact, that is probably the reason that people unfortunately have learned not to listen. There's even a fable about it.
- sandspar 1y agoThanks for the caution! That's good advice. Although I do think that AI fits the pattern of "real big thing". In general, cultural diffusion progresses in three stages: from insiders to money people to the public. For example, great artists are recognized first by fellow artists and critics, then by art auctions, then by the broader public. AI seems to be following a similar trajectory. AGI is felt first by insiders (AI researchers), then by money people (politicians and business leaders - we are here) then by the public (I'm guessing soon).
- achierius 1y ago"Warn" lol. They're just telegraphing ahead of the layoffs they intend to do to capture more $$$, to whatever extent AI makes that possible. What are people supposed to do? Your economic system is a joke
- oblio 1y agoThe thing is, there's no solution. If AI truly comes in the current capitalistic system, there is no endgame. Ourobouros.
- rvz 1y agoThis is their real definition of "AGI" without them admitting it directly.
- fracus 1y agoIt would make sense for the government to tax these companies using AI so they can put the money towards social programs.
- simonw 1y agoBecause I continue to collect definitions of "agent", here's what Andy Jassy said in that memo: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-on-generative-ai https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and... > 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.
- imiric 1y ago> Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast. This is the same wishful thinking that AI companies are heavily marketing. Nobody will want to use an "agent" that makes mistakes 60% of the time. Until the industry figures out a way to fix the problems that have plagued this technology since the beginning―which won't be solved by more compute, better data, or engineering hacks―this agentic future they've been promising is a pipe dream.
- edanm 1y agoI appreciate you keeping up the fight for correct terminology! I think at this point though there is a "standard" definition of agent - an AI that can actually utilize external real-world tools to do things on behalf of users. That fits coding agents, web-using agents, etc. Do you think there's still confusion around it like there was a year ago?
- simonw 1y agoDefinitely. The one you are using there is pretty much the accepted software engineering definition now, but if you talk to non-engineers you'll still hear all sorts of variants about things like travel agents or UI automation or "autonomy" without explaining what that means. Anthropic use the tools-in-a-loop one quite consistently now, but OpenAI still sometimes say things like "AI agents are AI systems that can do work for you independently. You give them a task and they go off and do it." - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/23/introducing-operator/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/23/introducing-operator/
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI'm suspecting that AI might reduce the force of the workforce as well. Eventually.
- xenihn 1y agoI'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.
- supertrope 1y agoSounds like the long term trend of companies hollowing themselves out by prioritizing sales and cutting “cost center” activities like engineering the product, manufacturing, support, R&D, and the overhead in running a company.
- jppope 1y agoI 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"
- sahaj 1y agoIt has more to do with the workforce wage demands and their output. Imagine if we all think that AI will get rid of our job at some point. We will work harder and demand less money do that work. All large corps did huge coordinated cuts in workforce in 2022-2023, and now there's this narrative. They are simply trying to get us to do more work for less money.
- jppope 1y agoEven hiring people at minimum wage costs a lot of money... Maybe they are firing people so they can rehire at a lower cost, but thats a really expensive way to get people to work for less.
- jchw 1y agoEven though I can fathom a world where AI tools could somehow lead to reduced head count, I think this is the only reasonable interpretation right now. After all, tech companies have been beating the "downsizing due to AI" drum for a really long time now, and for almost the entire time it has been very blatantly obvious bullshit.
- another_twist 1y agoWhat amazes me is the vile shit directed towards software engineers. Remember that letter from the dickhead investor to Google demanding to know why engineers were paid 450k. Or just PMs beating the drum about how you don't need engineers ? My reaction to that was hey all the tools you love to throw into engineers faces were devtools. You know the dev part is important. Remember Bubble, their whole schtick was you dont need a technical cofounder and I have yet to see a unicorn Bubble app. Instead of talking about how we all can collaborate, people really are hating on engineers for nothing.
- super_linear 1y agoThe 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-andy-jassy-on-generative-ai https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...
- earth2mars 1y agoMy 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.
- e40 1y agoWho does the Amazon CEO think will purchase their products, as income inequality increases and people are replaced with agents or robots?
- rwmj 1y agoAs long as he has his New Zealand bunker ready to go he doesn't care. Who can he trust amongst his security team is the greater concern for him.
- fsndz 1y agoI am tired of seeing this. First the Klarna dude did it and it backfired. Now Andy... People fail to grasp the fact that building AI agents is no longer enough, you need to do more: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/building-ai-agents-is-not-enough-bb9d8d8b6887?sk=8a77f8adddd432bdc3fcba0a821af804 https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/building-ai-...
- daxfohl 1y agoI 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.
- hiddencost 1y agoCoordination costs in software are brutal. More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.
- lucianbr 1y agoTrue, but the large companies are incentivised to not see or accept that. I really don't think Jassy is thinking that he wants Amazon to be smaller so it has lower coordination costs. It will also have a smaller market cap, you know?
- alephnerd 1y agoI'm on the board or a board observer for a couple companies (some public, some startups), and it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B. The headcount growth during COVID along with the return of offshoring with GCCs was driven by the intention to speed up delivery of products and initiatives. There are some IR games being played, but the productivity gains are real - where you may have recruited a new grad or non-trad candidates, now you can reduce hiring significantly and overindex on hiring and better compensating more experienced new hires. Roles, expectations, and responsibilities are also increasingly getting merged - PMs are expected to have the capabilities of junior PMMs, SEs, UX Designers, and Program Managers; and EMs and Principal Engineers are increasingly expected to have the capabilities of junior UX Designers, Program Managers, and PMs. This was already happening before ChatGPT (eg. The Amazon PM paradigm) but it's getting turbocharged now that just about every company has licenses for Cursor, Copilot, Glean Enterprise, and other similar tools.
- shmerl 1y agoWaiting for AI to reduce CEOs.
- gedy 1y agoI'm noticing a pattern that any one or company that talks about AI "agents" is full of snake oil they are trying to sell you.
- gedy 1y agoReplying to myself, but maybe this is to tap into power-trip marketing to manager or business types e.g. "fleets of agents", "at your fingertips", etc.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sublinear 1y agoI 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.
- exabrial 1y agoNo they won’t lol. What’s actually happening is ceos are realizing that they don’t need to employ 100,000 JavaScript developers, there’s probably easier and better ways to solve the same problems… but yeah blaming ai sounds makes firing people a lot softer
- crop_rotation 1y agoYou are totally correct. Most of big tech has way too many SWEs (which if good for society definitely), but I don't see that number surviving LLMs.
- owebmaster 1y agoCan AI build Google? 100,000 developers can.
- crop_rotation 1y agoIt is irrelevant whether it can or can not, since most SWEs are not building google but building yet another CRUD API.(and Google was not built by 100k developers but a much smaller but extremely talented small number of developers).
- owebmaster 1y agoMany company with billions to invest can build Google now.
- owebmaster 1y agoThey don't need it anymore because the tech and the customer base is built already. New companies will employ 100,00 javascript developers if that is what it takes to become trillion dollar companies.
- markus_zhang 1y ago> 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. 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. I believe the business leaders are seriously considering about this -- i.e. not necessarily just as an excuse to RIF, but they probably believe in this. Whether it is going to be successful is irrelevant. I'm eagerly waiting for someone to talk about AI integration experiments within FAANG. I'm surprised no one has talked about it yet -- maybe there is some kind of NDA or the experiments are still in early stages. Once the experiments are proved to be marginally successful, I bet the leaders are going to start some mass layoffs -- or maybe worse, if they are pressured by stock prices, to do that and see what happens before anything conclusive. To any team who is integrating AI into your company's data or doc -- please STOP and don't do that. I'm not talking about USING AI, but INTEGRATING AI.
- faizshah 1y agoAnything you can do with 1 person these large companies will figure out how to do with 10+ people + a PM + a Director/VP sponsor + 3-6 months of red tape and review and a late game “re-alignment” (rewrite) of the features right before the launch date. More money is spent at most of these companies coordinating work than actually doing work.
- crop_rotation 1y agoHN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs. Yes claude code can not write a new web browser from scratch or even some innovative project, but almost nobody is doing that. Most of non big tech is writing the same CRUD apps with trivial differences. Even 90% of big tech (outside the core infra) is just writing CRUD apps. I have worked at two big tech companies in fairly senior levels and almost everyone is doing CRUD work, not that there is anything wrong with it. But the comments saying Claude can't replace some genius are irrelevant. The amount of SWEs at big tech itself is so high that law of averages dictate most people are not rockstars (and this is validated in my observations). Most SWEs just write internal RPC to internal RPC wrappers. I am seeing that everyone is relying a lot on these tools, and the new SWEs seem to utterly depend on them. HN users will always have some edge case pointed out but most of software is crud apps low scale (even big tech most internal tool is low scale) and these tools are definitely doing better than the median SWE I have encountered.
- rsynnott 1y ago> HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs. I mean, this is about the fourth "this will massively reduce the need for programmers" thing in the last 20 years. And it increasing feels like the previous ones; lots of hype, lots of marketing, very little empirical evidence that it's doing anything much. For CRUD stuff _in particular_, people have been promising CRUD without icky programmers any day now for longer than most users of this website have been alive.
- saguntum 1y agoYes. "No code" was the hot topic last decade. I think LLMs will make individual programmers more productive, but demand for software is very elastic. Medium-term (next 10-20 years), I think we'll just be producing more software.
- conartist6 1y ago"We won't need people with agency, but we will need slaves for agents"
- jcoq 1y agoCBS mischaracterized this memo, which says basically that there will be fewer of some jobs and more of other. It's a pretty bland memo and a thinly veiled advertisement for AWS.
- bauerb1 1y agoare you not grounded in the same reality as I am? outlook for Amazon looks incredible between, AI, AWS, Adverts, shopping. Amazon has been "reducing corporate workforce" in fulfillment centers for years, why would anyone think that they would not apply the same operating model to knowledge work? AI does not need to be particularly good to replace what many office workers, and junior IT staff do everyday. I think what scares people about Amazon is that they are actually finding success replacing human workers with machines.