AI Will Shrink Amazon's Workforce In the Coming Years, CEO Jassy Says
- Reference: 0178079151
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/17/2041222/ai-will-shrink-amazons-workforce-in-the-coming-years-ceo-jassy-says
- Source link:
> Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out "how to get more done with scrappier teams." The directive comes as Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022 and made several cuts this year. Amazon cut about 200 employees in its North America stores unit in January and a further 100 in its devices and services unit in May. Amazon had 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees in its global workforce as of the end of March, according to financial filings. The company also employs temporary workers in its warehouse operations, along with some contractors.
>
> Amazon is using generative AI broadly across its internal operations, including in its fulfillment network where the technology is being deployed to assist with inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of warehouse robots, Jassy said. [...] In his [3]most recent letter to shareholders, Jassy called generative AI a "once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know." He added that the technology is "saving companies lots of money," and stands to shift the norms in coding, search, financial services, shopping and other areas. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen," Jassy said.
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-on-generative-ai
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/ai-amazon-workforce-jassy.html
[3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-2024-letter-to-shareholders
I'm Still Not Seeing It (Score:3)
Yesterday I had a need to extract a bunch of documents our of a web based ERP system. The ERP system has a pretty extensive and quite good API. But, I wasn't in the mood to study and learn a new API to do a simple script that would pull all customer numbers and then iterate through each customer and download their files.
I decided to try the Vibe coding that the cool kids are supposedly doing. I tried Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude. None of them could assemble even a basic remotely working Python or JavaScript script. Attempt after attempt, they al returned completely incorrect and completely non-functional paragraphs of code. I could get nothing of value from AI.
Today, I spent three hours studying the API and finding the relevant calls. I had a fully functional Python script running in 30 minutes and the task completed two hours later.
AI 0 Weak Programmer 1
I just don't see successful replacement of human coders with AI.
Re: (Score:2)
In Amazon's case, I'm having a hard time believing they'll replace people they can treat as slaves with machines that don't care how much you abuse them. I mean, really, how superior can you feel to a machine?
Re: (Score:1)
In other words there is no reason for them to pay you?
AI has a tough time with older languages (Score:2)
Especially python. There's a metric ton of old code posts floating around and it doesn't know which one to throw at you.
If the language is really old and unchanging like say c++ or c then you can get working code out of it because they're just isn't a lot of things that break completely under those languages. And if it's very very new you can get working code because the data it was trained on is very new.
What I found with python when I had to upgrade a python 2 app to Python 3 was any code I was giv
Ditto (Score:2)
> Today, I spent three hours studying the API and finding the relevant calls. I had a fully functional Python script running in 30 minutes and the task completed two hours later.
> AI 0 Weak Programmer 1
> I just don't see successful replacement of human coders with AI.
Today's AI adventure....Claude...simplify my stupidly complex loop....it returned the exact same code...OK, fine...I know you can simplify it and lambda it...but I was feeling lazy and it'll probably pass a PR.....Claude, write me a unit test for my stupidly complex loop function (this is integrated into my IDE, so it has full visibility into the project)....the fucking thing doesn't compile. Why?...the braces didn't match!?!?!?....OK, I fix the braces for them...well, it hallucinated Mockito functions I'v
Re: (Score:2)
> I wrote a unit test...assuming I was just being paranoid....nope...I had garbage on my hands...generated by Claude 4.0 and it LOOKED right, but wasn't....and it almost got past me.
Your boss needs to hear about that - seriously.
Re: Ditto (Score:2)
His boss's boss will probably say to fire him for not drinking the cool aid.
The think tanks that advise the companies boards are pushing the AI adoption very hard, so all the CEOs are complying, whether they believe it or not.
The individual contributors and middle managers onky have the choice to comply or get laid off, most of the time the latter.
Re: (Score:2)
I have had almost no luck having AI work with proprietary, or even unpopular APIs.
Caveat: I have had much more luck with them when using derived AI trained on said proprietary APIs, assuming sufficient code exists to leverage. So perhaps you need to tell the boss you need to spend money to hire a team of people to train an AI on your various APIs. Once the bill for that one comes in, you'll be safe.
I wish (Score:2)
I wish every employee at every company whose elites claim they can replace large swaths of people with AI could just walk away and leave those companies with no one left to run them. See how far they get with AI alone.
Not far.
PHB*-to-English Translation: (Score:5, Funny)
"Sales are in a slump, so we'll fire employees yet blame staff shrinkage on replacement by our wonderful shiny AI"
* Dilbert's boss who is light on knowledge but heavy on buzzwords and BS.
You're underestimating the AI boom (Score:2)
Whether llms really make a huge difference the constant press AI gets has convinced every single CEO that they need to automate everything.
There are tons of things in every single organization that CEOs have held back on automating because they just didn't believe it could be automated. Like the old joke, go away or I will replace you with a tiny Perl script.
AI has convinced every CEO on the planet that everything can be automated. Add to that that the current American administration is driving the
Re: (Score:1)
I think the solution to all the problems if for all companies to fire all employees and replace them all with AI/Robots. Imagine the savings!
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree with your sentiment, there is one problem. Amazon's revenues are increasing at a rate of about 10% per year, not decreasing. [1]https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net].
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/revenue#:~:text=Amazon%20annual%20revenue%20for%202024,a%209.4%25%20increase%20from%202021