SAN FRANCISCO – Artificial intelligence (AI) is already shifting the job market.
On Tuesday, Amazon.com Inc. announced it would cut roughly 14,000 jobs, or around 4% of its total workforce. This comes at a time when Amazon is spending enormously on AI.
“Functionally, Amazon is an AI company. This move reinforces their narrative that AI isn’t just a product they sell — it’s a capability they operationalize internally,” Sparq CEO Ingrid Curtis said. As more companies begin implementing AI, the conversation around job displacement and the potential limits of AI deployment has become not just about the future, but about what is happening now.
iMerit Technology founder, Radha Basu offered this take on Amazon’s layoffs, growing adoption of AI, and the potential for displacement, “I look at it as tech companies applying AI. A lot of these people who are coming out of tech, it’s not them losing the job. It’s getting them trained for AI jobs. This is not even the future. It’s current. It’s the creation of an AI workforce instead of the current workforce.”
The sentiment that AI will be used to unlock new, streamlined work for employees was echoed in a message to Amazon workers from CEO Andy Jassy. “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said in a written memo to employees. “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.”
While there has been some concern companies will use new technology as an excuse to reduce costs without leading to major innovation, Curtis thinks otherwise. “It’s less about reduction for reductions sake and more about reallocating resources toward strategic growth initiatives and AI-enabled innovation,” he said. “The goal isn’t simply headcount reduction. It’s to clear the noise of autonomous, repetitive tasks so that people can engage in deeper problem-solving and creative, value-driving work.”
Humans in The Loop
That view, that as AI becomes a larger and larger part of our economy it will free up workers for more engaging and useful tasks, remains by and large hypothetical. We have yet to see what the overall levels of displacement will be, or how quickly they will come. What is already playing out is that as AI evolves to work autonomously in crucial domains of our society such as health care, agriculture, or finance, more humans will be needed to ensure AI agents can be trusted.
“In mission-critical fields, precision is not an option,” Basu said, highlighting that errors we often see from consumer large language models (LLMs) are not tolerable when AI models are working in major industries. “The AI provides the scale, and the human provides the precision,” she added. “We do not see this changing for a long time.”
For now, the hope remains that AI will serve as a catalyst for innovation, and not an excuse for cost control. As Curtis said, “The companies that get this right are the ones that view AI not as a substitute for talent, but as an accelerator for it — enabling employees to think bigger, move faster, and contribute at a higher level.”
How widely held this view of AI’s utility is by major corporations remains to be seen, as are the prospects of workers in a quickly shifting, AI-driven economic environment.
