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Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

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Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#51

Post by swader999 »

daxfohl wrote: post #38

I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit? There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But w…

Yes! I'd imagine a lot of employees will just replace the SAAS that laid them off using AI to leap ahead or just jump ship to a competitor to do the same thing.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#52

Post by alephnerd »

lucianbr wrote: post #48
hiddencost wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coordination costs in software are brutal. More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.

True, but the large companies are incentivised to not see or accept that. I really don't think Jassy is thinking that he wants Amazon to be smaller so it has lower coordination costs. It will also have a smaller market cap, you know?

I'm on the board or a board observer for a couple companies (some public, some startups), and it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B.

The headcount growth during COVID along with the return of offshoring with GCCs was driven by the intention to speed up delivery of products and initiatives.

There are some IR games being played, but the productivity gains are real - where you may have recruited a new grad or non-trad candidates, now you can reduce hiring significantly and overindex on hiring and better compensating more experienced new hires.

Roles, expectations, and responsibilities are also increasingly getting merged - PMs are expected to have the capabilities of junior PMMs, SEs, UX Designers, and Program Managers; and EMs and Principal Engineers are increasingly expected to have the capabilities of junior UX Designers, Program Managers, and PMs. This was already happening before ChatGPT (eg. The Amazon PM paradigm) but it's getting turbocharged now that just about every company has licenses for Cursor, Copilot, Glean Enterprise, and other similar tools.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#53

Post by takklz »

daxfohl wrote: post #38

I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit? There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But w…

Same thought I had. Almost everything piece of technology that I use is broken in some way. UI bugs, connection issues, missing obvious features, missing non obvious features that might be specific to me, terrible UI, etc etc.

If AI is so useful that it can fully replace engineers or other humans, why aren’t products next level amazing?

If the barrier to entry for these high margin tech companies becomes so low that they no longer even need employees, isn’t the next step to compete on quality?

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#54

Post by whatever1 »

jppope wrote: post #26

I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI and more to do with the revenue outlook or the growth outlook. Basically, they are "narrative shopping" to save face with the stock market... and IMO it might work. Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduc…

In my case AI has boosted my productivity towards directions that are not on the critical path for a project, but nevertheless very nice to have.

For example now I have a ton of graphs and interactive UI pages that interact with my code. Made everyone’s lives easier, but at least in my case it was not a dealbreaker not having these, and frankly nobody was willing to pay for them.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#55

Post by another-dave »

hiddencost wrote: post #41
daxfohl wrote: post #38

I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit? There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But w…

Coordination costs in software are brutal. More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.

AI as a coordination multiplier would be interesting in large orgs — the AI assistant that trains on internal newsletters & minutes of all-hands says "I think you should loop John Doe from team X into this discussion because 1 year ago he ran point on something similar"

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#56

Post by lucianbr »

ITB wrote: post #25
nullorempty wrote: post #4

> We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. What he hopes for is to just reduce the number of people they employ. So the "more people doing other types of jobs" just makes the message more palatable. Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?

Capitalism is the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It will work out.

That's why there's no such thing as regulatory capture or monopolies or rent-seeking, right? They just don't happen in capitalism, because they are inefficient.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#57

Post by CharlesW »

jppope wrote: post #26

I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI and more to do with the revenue outlook or the growth outlook. Basically, they are "narrative shopping" to save face with the stock market... and IMO it might work. Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduc…

> I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI…

You can legitimately argue "far less to do with", but it's definitely not nothing. There are countless projects underway where AI will allow for 10% reductions with zero business impact in the short term, and 25-40% reductions (sometimes more) by 2030.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#58

Post by exabrial »

No they won’t lol. What’s actually happening is ceos are realizing that they don’t need to employ 100,000 JavaScript developers, there’s probably easier and better ways to solve the same problems… but yeah blaming ai sounds makes firing people a lot softer

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#59

Post by markus_zhang »

> As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. 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.

I believe the business leaders are seriously considering about this -- i.e. not necessarily just as an excuse to RIF, but they probably believe in this. Whether it is going to be successful is irrelevant.

I'm eagerly waiting for someone to talk about AI integration experiments within FAANG. I'm surprised no one has talked about it yet -- maybe there is some kind of NDA or the experiments are still in early stages. Once the experiments are proved to be marginally successful, I bet the leaders are going to start some mass layoffs -- or maybe worse, if they are pressured by stock prices, to do that and see what happens before anything conclusive.

To any team who is integrating AI into your company's data or doc -- please STOP and don't do that. I'm not talking about USING AI, but INTEGRATING AI.

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