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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

#71

Post by CharlesW »

another_twist wrote: post #63
CharlesW wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am curious, where are these numbers from ?

These are realistic (IMHO, of course) projections based on studies I've helped with and conversations I've had with my network. Naturally, the impact will vary enormously based on roles, and the timelines won't be evenly distributed.

But these kinds of projections aren't unusual at all — if you use the Deep Research capabilities of modern models to build a list of public projections for your own research, you'll see similar estimates. These reports will generally use the framing of "efficiency gains", where AI will "free-up employees from drudgery to focus on higher-value work", but my intuition is that a future where all individual contributors are elevated to Director of Agentic Workflows is probably not the most likely outcome.

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

#73

Post by diamond559 »

CharlesW wrote: post #57
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.

Countless projects huh, CMU found the best of them has only a 30%ish success rate on basic business tasks. Many are below 90% still, but yeah let's just pull magic numbers out of thin air. How much Nvda you own bud?

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

#74

Post by Mawr »

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.

The best way to increase efficiency is to externalize costs. E.g. by polluting the environment with your coal plant. The taxpayer takes on the burden of the cleanup and the company gets pure profit. So efficient. Capitalism is beautiful.

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

#75

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jppope wrote: post #69
CharlesW wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

ok. so you can reduce your head count without impact great! Why would you get rid of people? Why would you not reassign those people into other productive or revenue generating activities? The only logical explanation is that they don't have enough opportunities to utilize those people OR as I previously mentioned... their financials might look bad, and they are trying to make them look better so they don't take a hi…

Fire people. Stonks go up. Bonus!

Stonks go down - fast - when all those fired people stop buying, but that's a problem for the next CEO.

As you say, they could also expand. Or just fix the problems with the site.

But they don't have the imagination to do that.

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

#76

Post by crop_rotation »

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…

> Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.

If that was true then the companies should never have been doing layoffs, as all these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

> The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"

This is assuming that companies have the capacity to keep increasing revenue by adding more workforce, which is just not true. At some point you hit diminishing returns with more workers. The same goes for Agent workers. To chase more revenue you need a lot more than just more SWEs and a lot of that is not currently similarly scalable.

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

#77

Post by crop_rotation »

HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs. Yes claude code can not write a new web browser from scratch or even some innovative project, but almost nobody is doing that. Most of non big tech is writing the same CRUD apps with trivial differences. Even 90% of big tech (outside the core infra) is just writing CRUD apps. I have worked at two big tech companies in fairly senior levels and almost everyone is doing CRUD work, not that there is anything wrong with it.

But the comments saying Claude can't replace some genius are irrelevant. The amount of SWEs at big tech itself is so high that law of averages dictate most people are not rockstars (and this is validated in my observations). Most SWEs just write internal RPC to internal RPC wrappers. I am seeing that everyone is relying a lot on these tools, and the new SWEs seem to utterly depend on them. HN users will always have some edge case pointed out but most of software is crud apps low scale (even big tech most internal tool is low scale) and these tools are definitely doing better than the median SWE I have encountered.

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

#78

Post by NitpickLawyer »

JCM9 wrote: post #8

This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.” Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

> and the story isn’t sticking with folks.

This take is getting old, and the story won't stick with folks till their desk is in a cardboard box...

Out of all the faangs, amz is the best positioned to remove staff and agentify the work they were doing. First, amz constantly churns the lower x%. They've been doing this for years now. They know what to count and who to fire. Second, amz has had everyone write a story about everything they do, day in, day out for years now. Change a lightbulb? Not without a story. Guess what you need for training LLMs? Yup, stories.

There are plenty of people writing stories and coordinating the writing of other stories. Those people will be the first out. It's never the top nor the bottom.

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

#79

Post by crop_rotation »

takklz wrote: post #53
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…

Because products never become next level amazing. Hardware got so fast and yet most software keeps getting bloated. Given a choice between writing near perfect software and cramming more features, almost all companies cater to more features (except in some rare domains or cases). Both because the latter is easier and because that's what people demand (not by their words but by their expressed preferences).

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

#80

Post by paulddraper »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #24
JCM9 wrote: post #8

This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.” Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

Anthropic is way behind? That might surprise a few people. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-cons...

Comment was about $AMZN

Fraction of that is Anthropic investment.

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