Amazon CEO tells employees that AI will shrink its workforce

FILE - AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks in Las Vegas, on Dec. 5, 2019. Amazon employees have been pushing back against the company’s return to office policy for months - and it seems Jassy has had enough. During a pre-recorded internal Q&A session earlier this month, Jassy told employees it was “past the time to disagree and commit” with the policy, which requires corporate employees to be in the office three days a week.  (Isaac Brekken/AP Images for NFL, File)

FILE - AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks in Las Vegas, on Dec. 5, 2019. Amazon employees have been pushing back against the company’s return to office policy for months - and it seems Jassy has had enough. During a pre-recorded internal Q&A session earlier this month, Jassy told employees it was “past the time to disagree and commit” with the policy, which requires corporate employees to be in the office three days a week. (Isaac Brekken/AP Images for NFL, File) ap file — Isaac Brekken

By CAROLINE O’DONOVAN

The Washington Post

Published: 06-21-2025 1:01 PM

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told employees in a Tuesday memo that he expects artificial intelligence to thin their ranks, reducing headcount at what is now the United States’ second-largest private employer.

“(I)n 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,” the memo said. It was also posted publicly.

Jassy described how AI technology will affect corporate workers such as software developers in addition to employees in Amazon warehouses, where he said the technology will “improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots.”

HR representatives instructed workers to read Jassy’s email, an employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job told The Washington Post. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

In the tech industry, firms including Meta and Shopify have increasingly been requiring employees to use AI, citing productivity improvements and the potential for personal advancement. But the warning to Amazon workers comes as excitement about AI in the tech industry has spurred new debate about whether the technology will be a job killer or creator.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, predicted last month that unemployment could spike to 20% in the next few years because of the technology he is racing to develop.

Politicians including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former president Barack Obama have said they are also concerned about job elimination. On Tuesday, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in his newsletter that AI companies had successfully used the threat of Chinese advancement on AI to evade regulation designed to address the risk of job elimination.

Economists have generally found that previous waves of AI and automation technology had overall little effect on employment, changing or eliminating some jobs but also creating new ones. A recent drop in the number of computer programmers has prompted suggestions that the latest AI advances have broken that past pattern.

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A Gallup report this week found a sharp increase in daily use of AI by U.S. workers, from 4% to 8% over the past year. Among white-collar workers, the share of employees using AI at least a few times a week increased from 15% to 27%.

Amazon and other large tech companies made sweeping layoffs in 2022 after hiring sprees during the coronavirus pandemic. Jassy — who replaced Bezos as CEO in 2021 — has made doing more with less a hallmark of his leadership. He created a money-saving metric called “cost to serve” that aims to drive down how much Amazon spends to deliver goods and services to customers.

Last year, Jassy said an AI coding assistant saved Amazon programmers 4,500 years of work by speeding up the task of upgrading software. The company has performed small workforce reductions in 2025, including on its books and devices team, according to Reuters and local news reports.

In screenshots of internal Slack messages shared with The Post, one Amazon employee noted that layoffs and attrition without replacement have become the norm at Amazon in recent years.

Jassy’s memo to employees Tuesday highlighted Amazon’s own AI products, including chatbots for shopping, tools for generative AI ads and Alexa+, an AI-enhanced version of the company’s virtual assistant that the company said is now available to 1 million consumers after a long road to launch.

In his email, Jassy encouraged employees who want to have long careers at Amazon to find a way to make use of the technology.

“(B)e curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can,” he wrote. “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”