Amazon announces AI will transform the work structure of the company in the U.S. Being one of the most influential companies in the world, Amazon has started a new strategy incorporating artificial intelligence to its workforce. This translates into many corporate jobs probably disappearing in the next few years, mostly the ones in which AI can do the tasks in a more efficient way.

This strategy is part of a global trend that is changing the way we work and starts the debate about the future of our jobs in artificial intelligence times. So, let’s see how Amazon is trying to incorporate this tool.

Amazon and AI

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, has announced this week they will be cutting the corporate workforce in the following years because they want to make use of artificial intelligence (AI). Why? Well, it’s commonly known that AI is showing huge improvements when it comes to efficiency and the more developed it is, the more efficient it will be.

Jassy explained that as AI starts getting more into the company processes, human presence won’t be necessary in some jobs. However, as AI gets included, it is said other jobs will appear to cover technological needs.

An investment of millions

Amazon is one of the companies with the highest number of employees in the world, more than 1.5 million people work at Amazon. However, the investment on AI is making the company spend around $100 billion in order to improve the AI services and build more data centers to make these systems bigger.

Last year, the investment in AI from Amazon was $83 billion, which shows the company is putting their faith in technology very fast.

New ways of working

The CEO of Amazon also said that AI agents, those programs capable of doing tasks on their own, will change the way we live and work. He’s talking about something that doesn’t exist in its majority, but he is convinced they will all be here very soon. What’s more, he drew attention to the fact that these tools will increase the innovation speed, which will be beneficial for Amazon clients.

If we count all Amazon’s services and AI applications, they have more than thousand of these working or in development in the company. So, they know what they are talking about.

Worrying among workers

This situation is making employees in the corporate world feel confused and worried about their work situation, since Amazon will influence other companies (and already doing it) to incorporate AI to do the tasks which are done by humans at the moment.

According to a study by Bloomberg Intelligence, AI could be taking up to 200,000 jobs in the banking sector and, as a consequence, spreading the uncertainty to other sectors about what will happen to their employees and their jobs.

Are other companies copying Amazon’s strategy?

Of course, companies from other sectors are already starting to introduce AI as a strategy to improve efficiency. Let’s see what companies are:

  • CrowdStrike: cybersecurity company that fired 5% of their workers in May.
  • Shopify: where the CEO said managers have to show tasks at this company can’t be done by AI before more employees get fired.
  • Duolingo: it will replace their employees in charge of repetitive tasks by AI, and just in the case of being unable to automate the teamwork more, more jobs will be announced.
  • BT Group CEO (UK) said they are thinking about firing 400,000 jobs in the next decade, but he warned this figure doesn’t show the impact AI could have.

So, as you can see AI seems more like a threat for all these people who have been trained for these jobs and have been working so long. We don’t know what the future will be and if we could really coexist with AI in the work environment. Let’s hope there’s a chance of humans and new technology working together.