Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy has recently doubled down on the performance of the company’s employees as it aims to move at a faster pace to beat competitors.
In January, Jassy began requiring workers to return to working in the office five days a week, which he believes will strengthen the company culture by making “collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing” even “simpler and more effective,” according to a memo he sent employees in September.
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Then, during an internal company meeting in March, Jassy said that bureaucracy needs to be removed from Amazon’s work culture, highlighting that the best leaders “get the most done with the least amount of resources required to do the job,” and that “every new project shouldn’t take 50 or more people to do it.”
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“The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom,” said Jassy. “There’s no award for having a big team. We want to be scrappy about us to do a lot more things.”
In his annual letter to shareholders, which was unveiled in April, Jassy doubled down on these ideas and emphasized that he wants Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup” as it operates in “fiercely competitive market segments.”
One way he believes this can be accomplished is by encouraging teams to complete work at a faster pace.
He also said that scaling back remote work was a crucial decision that allows the company to keep up with the pace of artificial intelligence.
Image source: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Amazon CEO sends stern warning to employees
Now, in a new memo to employees, Jassy warns that since AI is rapidly expanding, it can shrink workforces.
He said Amazon has heavily invested in AI by implementing it in its advertising, in its personal assistant Alexa, on its website to help customers shop, and in several internal corporate operations.
“AI agents will change how we all work and live,” said Jassy. “Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems.”
He said that AI will “automate a lot of tasks that consume our time” and that “there will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field,” threatening to replace jobs, including those at Amazon.
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“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” said Jassy. “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.”
Amid this drastic change, Jassy is encouraging employees to “educate” themselves about AI.
“As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” said Jassy.
AI is making workers nervous
Jassy’s warning to employees comes during a time when many Americans are worried about AI replacing their jobs.
According to a recent survey from YouGov, more than one-third of U.S. workers are worried that AI will result in job loss or fewer work hours.
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Also, 56% of workers in the survey believe that AI will shrink the number of job opportunities, and 55% think that their work hours will be reduced due to the technology.
Amazon isn’t the only company that has recently touted AI in the workplace.
Last week, Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said in an interview with Fortune Magazine that AI has reduced the time it takes to hire employees by 75%.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in May, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna even said that AI has replaced hundreds of HR workers at his company, which has also resulted in more hiring.
Related: Chipotle CEO praises an alarming hiring practice in the workplace
