Amazon Pitches AI Tools as Co-Workers While Axing Jobs 32
Amazon used its annual re:Invent cloud conference in Las Vegas to pitch a vision of the workplace where AI agents serve not as tools but as "co-workers" and "teammates," even as the company proceeds with eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in its second major workforce reduction in recent years.
AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous "frontier agents" could represent 80 to 90% of enterprise AI value. Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions, described a future where companies manage "teams" of agents capable of working autonomously for hours or days while humans shift into supervisory roles. Amazon has already deployed agentic systems across tens of thousands of its own engineers to triage outages and propose fixes. The company calls these systems "teammates" rather than tools. CEO Andy Jassy has warned that AI would shrink Amazon's workforce, though a spokesperson attributed the current cuts to "reducing bureaucracy" and "removing layers" rather than AI deployment.
AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous "frontier agents" could represent 80 to 90% of enterprise AI value. Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions, described a future where companies manage "teams" of agents capable of working autonomously for hours or days while humans shift into supervisory roles. Amazon has already deployed agentic systems across tens of thousands of its own engineers to triage outages and propose fixes. The company calls these systems "teammates" rather than tools. CEO Andy Jassy has warned that AI would shrink Amazon's workforce, though a spokesperson attributed the current cuts to "reducing bureaucracy" and "removing layers" rather than AI deployment.
If you make the KoolAid (Score:5, Insightful)
... you have to drink the KoolAid.
Will his co-CEO AI Teammate take his job?
Will Amazon's Teammates effectively infect the other AI Teammates to recommend Amazon's products, delivered by robots, for gear made by robots, to robot purchasers?
Will all the AI and robotry be able to form a new society without those pesky humans-- now unemployed? We wait with baited breath for our new AI overlords.
Re:If you make the KoolAid (Score:5, Funny)
Will all the AI and robotry be able to form a new society without those pesky humans-- now unemployed? We wait with baited breath for our new AI overlords.
We'll make great pets
Re:If you make the KoolAid (Score:5, Insightful)
My prediction is that all this "AI Agent" stuff will be dead within at most 2 years due to spectacular failures. They already have created really easy to use attack paths on people's systems and data several times now and they cannot really secure them.
Remember, the problem AI solves is wages (Score:5, Insightful)
And remember they do not need to replace all of us. Doing something like 15 to 25% would completely hollow out consumer spending which is already under threat because massive income inequality means that 80% of our consumer spending comes from baby boomers and those people have about 10 years left before they are pushing up daisies.
And they will not be leaving any inheritance to speak of. What they don't spend on RVs and morning mimosas is going to be eating up by collapsing healthcare systems.
The system of capitalism is being dismantled. It's not breaking down it's being broken down. And if you are under 65 you are going to experience that process. And if you have less than 100 million in your bank account it's not going to be fun.
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And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.
Almost thought you were serious (Score:2)
I do sense a little desperation. A little bit of cope. Something is happening that you know is going to hurt you and your worldview isn't equipped to deal with it.
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As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.
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His point is reasonable. And look at programmers (and to a certain extent admins), they do nothing else than automating themselves away. They just know, they are still needed, but at a higher level. You may lose the job as assembler programmer when someone invents a compiler, but you get a job as C++ programmer. You lose the job to implement textbook algorithms when someone licenses a library with the algorithms, but you get the job to build the cool application using the algorithms. Don't fall for the "lum
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That is usually true, but we don't always use AI to replace employees (although it usually does).
I am working on something now that reads all of our transcripts and identifies what part of each call takes the most time to help product management prioritize call center improvements. Traditional NLP couldn't do as good of a job at this as early testing is showing LLMs can do. We would have to more than triple our call center staff to have a human listen to every single call and identify opportunities to impro
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Yes, and so is every form of automation.
We software developers have been automating things for decades now. What does all that automation do? Reduce a company's need to pay wages.
And somehow, we're all still employed. Amazing! It's almost as if all this automation creates more jobs in the long run!
spin (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how you try to spin the fact that you are having layoffs into a positive.
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But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so t
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yes yes lets trust Amazon, i mean using the verbiage Teammates, Coworkers is just nothing to do with actual job loss of teammates and coworkers.
And the stupid doubles down (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it totally fascinating how determinedly these "decision makers" try to ignore that LLMs cannot deliver anything but a tiny fraction of the claims made about them.
Groupthink, FOMO, plain old stupid, all intensely at work.
In other news, LLMs and generative AI lose potential application scenarios that would make operating them worthwhile left and right. Apparently different art communities see it as fraud if you use generative AI and not declare that. And if you declare, nobody wants your stuff anymore. Nice!
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I partially agree with you, but it depends heavily on the task. In certain kind of work AI really helps you, in other kind of work it just waster your time. Work where finding the answer is hard (but not too hard), but validating it is easy and fast, AI works quite well.
I think that the problem is that quite many try to use AI for work where AI is extremely bad at. E.g. I would not use AI to write production code, because it is much harder to validate and fix code than write it yourself, but I could use AI
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I think that the problem is that quite many try to use AI for work where AI is extremely bad at. E.g. I would not use AI to write production code, because it is much harder to validate and fix code than write it yourself, but I could use AI to write prototype code, because you can validate it well enough just by running it.
I currently have a student thesis running on that question. Results so far are that AI does not find issues above toy level reliably and not basically not at all on CVE level. Fine for a non-network connected prototype, a disaster for production code. At the same time, AI provides a ton of help for attackers that they did not have before.
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Why would I have a prediction? Stupid actions have the most random effects. That is one reason they are stupid.
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I find it totally fascinating how determinedly these "decision makers" try to ignore that LLMs cannot deliver anything but a tiny fraction of the claims made about them.
In fairness, since some of the claims are that AI will replace all jobs, even massive disruption such as replacing 10% of the workforce is still a very big deal. I'll be surprised if we don't reduce our call center staff by at least 50% in the next 3 years, and AI chat/voice bots is a small portion of that projection. That is mostly from AI agents assisting call center agents and assisting product managers to find ways to improve human agent UX.
LLMs were capable of doing all of this in early 2024, and have
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There are a number of problems with LLM-type AI being rushed in this fast. It can take jobs where the occasional massive screw-up does not matter much. Callcenters are probably one of those. The second one is that there are still not enough real applications that would generate profit and the number of failures is rising, while the number of successes is not. Hence this thing has gotten way too large and basically must collapse and the only question is when. Also, many are in denial and think they have a su
Paywall (Score:2)
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https://archive.ph/bSLWx [archive.ph]
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We need to push for CEOs to be replaced with AI. They'd do a better job and would cost a LOT less.
Start repeating this everywhere and get the meme-makers on it. It will be wonderful to watch them squirm as they suddenly find reasons why AI shouldn't replace a company's most valuable assets: its most highly-paid executives.
A CEO doesn't get paid for any of the work AI does. CEOs collect information from other executives, peers, consultants, and the media and make decisions. LLMs can disrupt the work of consultants, the media, and the employees feeding information to executives, but it's horrible at making good decisions that can be trusted.
claiming it won't work (Score:2)
I see people here preaching doom, gloom, and failures but the fact is that AI is already working successfully at Amazon;
'companies will become more receptive when they see AI agents deliver material efficiency gains, “that’s when it is worth it to go make these changes.”
To support its case, Amazon points to internal software development, where it has deployed agentic systems across tens of thousands of engineers. These agents triage outages, propose fixes and handle the tedious operational
Sorry! (Score:3)
perspective (Score:2)
let's go back to covid: an unexpected input, truly significant, but it was not the end of times. People and business however did see it as nearly biblical wipeout and responded by hoarding. [people hoarded toilet paper (!)] and companies hoarded employees, especially "engineers", which skewed compensation to unsustainable levels.
Now, here comes AI, and companies need to trim back significantly. Business communicates that AI can "do the job", but the job is
Propose executive AI (Score:2)
How much money can your company save by cutting all those highly paid, ivy league, predictable pricks?
Sorry. I meant AI can really enhance your senior management layer's value.
LLM: Fantasy progress, real bargaining chip (Score:2)
This is your replacement (Score:2)