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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

#81

Post by diamond559 »

CharlesW wrote: post #71
another_twist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What studies? MIT estimates only 5% of the workforce can be replaced long term. What tasks are you employees using AI on, CMU shows the best llm only has a ~30% success rate for basic business tasks. Are you a vibe coding start up or something?

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

#82

Post by crop_rotation »

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.

> Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to execute.

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

#83

Post by CharlesW »

diamond559 wrote: post #73
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.

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?

Zero Nvidia. The CMU benchmark is fun, but tasks jobs. They found that agents can autonomously finish about a third of their simulated office tasks, but that can't be mapped to a labor-market forecast.

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

#84

Post by crop_rotation »

exabrial wrote: post #58

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

You are totally correct. Most of big tech has way too many SWEs (which if good for society definitely), but I don't see that number surviving LLMs.

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

#85

Post by CharlesW »

diamond559 wrote: post #81
CharlesW wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What studies? MIT estimates only 5% of the workforce can be replaced long term. What tasks are you employees using AI on, CMU shows the best llm only has a ~30% success rate for basic business tasks. Are you a vibe coding start up or something?

> MIT estimates only 5% of the workforce can be replaced long term.

The model by MIT's Daron Acemoglu estimates that ~5% of U.S. tasks can be completely and profitably automated by AI within ten years.

It was expressly not a head-count forecast, and didn't attempt to quantify the headcount reduction that AI augmentation could enable.

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

#86

Post by evil-olive »

another-dave wrote: post #55
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.

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"

> I think you should loop John Doe from team X into this discussion

yeah, that's a useful thing that a chatbot could do...in theory.

in practice, from the recent CMU study [0] of how actual LLMs perform on real-world tasks like this:

> For example, during the execution of one task, the agent cannot find the right person to ask questions on RocketChat. As a result, it then decides to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.

0: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14161 (pdf)

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

#87

Post by leptons »

rwmj wrote: post #7
leptons wrote: post #3

They will scrap it as soon as "AI" "hallucinates" Amazon into an embarrassing loss or problem somewhere that didn't have to happen.

Have you bought anything from Amazon? They have no issues with flushing their reputation down the toilet, as long as it makes or saves money.

Ever hear the phrase "buyer beware"? It's been around for thousands of years.

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

#88

Post by supertrope »

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…

The market has reached an equilibrium of the minimum quality a business can get away with before customers switch away. Customers usually prioritize time to market or price before quality. There’s still a niche for excellent quality tech but you will pay much more for it.

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

#89

Post by supertrope »

zdragnar wrote: post #18
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.

It definitely has the "thought leader" vibe that most fluff pieces from C level types have.

The AI craze has shown that most businesses leaders blindly follow buzzwords.

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

#90

Post by drewbeck »

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…

1. Software issues are not merely technical, they’re human. Someone has to care about the issue and prioritize it and get it fixed. 2. Many products don’t compete on software because there are more substantive market forces at play.

AI won’t fundamentally alter either of these facts.

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