June 27, 2025
SEATTLE – There’s been a lot of commentary about artificial intelligence over the past couple of years, but not all opinions carry the same weight. Experts ask; Will AI be helpful, disruptive, or an existential threat to humanity?
Last week’s message from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did not cover the extreme theories, but it provided a window on at least one especially salient aspect of AI—namely job loss. “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy writes. “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.”
The letter starts by confirming the current use of AI with Jassy reminding employees and users that, “We’re using Generative AI to make customers lives better and easier. What started as deep conviction that every customer experience would be reinvented using AI, and that altogether new experiences we’ve only dreamed of would become possible, is rapidly becoming reality. Technologies like Generative AI are rare; they come about once-in-a-lifetime, and completely change what’s possible for customers and businesses. So, we are investing quite expansively, and, the progress we are making is evident.”
Jassy mentions advertising as another category that is specifically aimed at boosting brands for online sellers. “We’ve built a suite of AI tools that make it easier for brands to plan, onboard, create and optimize campaigns,” he writes. “In Q1 alone, over 50K advertisers used these capabilities. And, you can see it in what we’re delivering in AWS for builders, whether it’s custom silicon (Trainium2) to provide better price-performance on model-training and inference…”
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