Amazon CEO says many jobs we’ve ‘thrown human beings at’ for the last 20-30 years won’t need as many humans

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said artificial intelligence will eliminate many human jobs and create new ones.

• People won’t be needed for “jobs that we’ve been putting on people for the last 20 or 30 years,” he said on CNBC.

• Jassy answered the following question: Layoffs at BlockHe said he “really couldn’t stomach” it.

Is the AI ​​job apocalypse here? CEO of Amazon He doesn’t think so.

White-collar workers are worried. On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced cutback plans almost half of the companyIt reduced the number of employees from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. More companies will follow suit by using AI for productivity gains, Dorsey said on the company’s earnings call.

In an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Friday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he “really couldn’t digest” the news from Block. Still, he had thoughts about the future of working with AI.

“I believe that most of the jobs that we’ve been putting on people for the last 20 or 30 years, you don’t need that many people doing the same jobs,” he said.

Jassy had previously signaled that artificial intelligence would lead white collar layoffs on Amazon.

“Over the next few years, we expect this to reduce our total corporate workforce as we realize productivity gains from widespread use of AI across the company,” Amazon CEO wrote in a memo to employees in June. Three internal Amazon Slack channels following the note enlightened by criticism from employees, Business Insider previously reported.

In the age of artificial intelligence, it is not just large companies that are reducing staff. Take, for example, AI coding startup Vercel, which trained a rep to sell and then laid off its 10-person sales team. up to one.

Jassy struck an optimistic tone in the Friday interview.

“I also think other jobs will be created, and that has always happened with every technology change,” he said.

He gave the example of cloud solution architect. This business didn’t exist 15 years ago, he said; There are tens of thousands of them now.

What new jobs will artificial intelligence bring? It is not clear yet. Some suggestions, such as the idea of ​​the role of artificial intelligence fast engineer – seems to be extinguished. But AI has definitely led to increased demand for certain types of products engineering roles and created a new market training data.

Jassy acknowledged in the interview that the business world is going through a “transition” period.

“We will get through this together,” he said.

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