AI may cut jobs but also create new ones, says Amazon CEO
NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned that artificial intelligence will eliminate many traditional jobs, though he insists the shift will ultimately spawn new roles. In a recent interview with CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jassy addressed industry-wide layoff fears by framing the AI boom as a necessary workforce transition rather than a permanent loss of employment.
Jassy notes that “there are going to be other jobs created, and that has always happened in every technology shift.”
AI job cuts: Efficiency to automate traditional roles
Jassy offered a stark view on the future of jobs that have heavily relied on human labor over the last few decades.
He made this clear when he said, “I do believe that a lot of the jobs that we’ve thrown human beings at for the last 20 or 30 years, you won’t need as many human beings doing those same jobs.”
The perspective aligns with broader technology industry trends, as companies today pursue efficiency gains through automation.
The debate follows recent news that Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company was laying off nearly half of its employees, reducing its workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. Dorsey stated that using AI to improve efficiency was a driving factor and predicted other companies would follow suit.
Further illustrating this trend, the AI coding startup Vercel reportedly reduced its 10-person sales team down to a single employee after training an AI agent to handle sales tasks, demonstrating that even specialized functions are being targeted for automation.
New AI jobs: Tech shift to create future career paths
Despite immediate concerns about job displacement, Jassy tapped into optimism by putting the current shift into perspective in the context of broader technological advancement.
He also promised that other jobs would be created, and that has always been the case with any technology shift. Jassy explained, “15 years ago, there was no such thing as a cloud solutions architect, and today there are tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 plus, of these types of jobs.”
“So we will have lots of new jobs and, you know, and there’ll be some sort of transition, and we’ll all work through it together.”
In a separate report by Business Insider, it is still unclear which jobs AI will create in the future, especially as initial ideas, such as the so-called AI prompt engineer, seem to have stalled.
However, Jassy admitted that the current era is a transition that will lead to an increasing need for specialized engineering and the development of new market segments, including a new market for training data.
Jassy has already signaled the workforce transformations internally; in June, he sent a memo to employees promising that, over the coming years, the massive adoption of AI would reduce the size of Amazon’s corporate workforce. This move had previously drawn internal employee criticism.
This highlights the two sides of AI in the labor market: automation will cause job displacement, though it will also create new, skilled roles, as technological change has across the employment spectrum.
