Amazon CEO signals upcoming workforce cuts amid AI adoption

Published 17/06/2025, 18:36
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Investing.com -- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy outlined the company’s extensive integration of generative AI across its operations in a blog post Wednesday, while signaling potential workforce reductions as AI technology increases efficiency.

In his message, Jassy described generative AI as a "once-in-a-lifetime" technology that is "completely changing what’s possible for customers and businesses." He highlighted several AI implementations already in use, including Alexa+, which he called "meaningfully smarter" and "the first personal assistant that can take significant actions for customers."

The CEO pointed to AI shopping features now used by "tens of millions of customers," including "Lens," which allows users to take pictures of items to find shopping results, and "Buy for Me," which enables purchasing from other merchant websites. He noted that nearly half a million selling partners are utilizing AI services to create product listings.

For AWS customers, Amazon has developed custom silicon (Trainium2), services for building Foundation Models (SageMaker), and its own frontier model (Nova) to provide "leading intelligence at lower latency and cost."

Jassy emphasized the company’s belief in AI agents as transformative tools that will "change how we all work and live," describing them as software systems that perform tasks using natural language commands. "There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field," he wrote.

While Amazon currently has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications built or in progress, Jassy indicated this represents "a small fraction of what we will ultimately build." He stated that as AI becomes more integrated, "we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today," adding that "in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively."

Jassy encouraged employees to embrace AI through education, experimentation, and participation in team brainstorming sessions, comparing the current moment to his early days at Amazon in 1997 when teams were leaner but highly ambitious.

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