Michelle Chapman, AP Business Writer
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expects generative artificial intelligence to cut down the corporate workforce in the coming years as online giants begin to increase their use of technology.
“There are fewer people doing some of the work that’s going on today, and more people doing other types of work,” Jassy said in a message to employees. “It will be difficult to know exactly where this is online over time, but over the next few years, this is expected to reduce the total workforce of businesses.
The executive said Amazon has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications that have been in progress or built, but that figure is a “minimum percentage” that it plans to build.
Jassy encouraged employees to board the e-commerce company’s AI plan.
“We’ll do this transformation together, find ways to be interested in AI, educate ourselves, attend workshops, get trained, experiment with AI whenever possible, get involved in team brainstorming, find ways to be faster and broader for our customers and achieve more with a more crude team,” he said.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced it plans to invest $10 billion in the construction of its North Carolina campus to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Since the start of 2024, Amazon has won nearly $10 billion in data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina, competing with other tech giants to increase infrastructure and meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence products.
Meanwhile, the rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has driven the demand for energy-hungry data centers that require electricity to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems. Earlier this month, Amazon said it would spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania.
In March, Amazon began testing artificial intelligence support dubbing for selected movies and shows offered on Prime streaming services. A month ago, the company deployed Alexa, which was injected with generative AI.
Amazon is also investing more heavily in AI. In November, the company said it was investing another $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup humanity. Two months ago, Chipmaker Intel said Foundry Business is creating custom artificial intelligence chips for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon, the main driver of AI ambitions.
Original issue: June 18th, 2025, 11:29am EDT
