- Amazon is hiring 11,000 new workers, mostly new graduates and interns
- Garman says they are more impressionable and more willing to adopt AI
- Willingness to learn could be more important than existing skills
Amazon CEO Matt Garman has confirmed the company’s plans to hire 11,000 interns and new graduates this year despite a continued internal push for artificial intelligence tools.
The news comes about six months after the company warned that 16,000 workers would lose their jobs, severely impacting Garman’s cloud business.
With the latest news, the company appears to be reorienting human resources rather than completely getting rid of human workers as business priorities shift and new opportunities open up.
Amazon will hire 11,000 workers in the same year it laid off 16,000
Talking to Casey Newton from Platforms In an interview on YouTube, Garman explained that white-collar jobs are changing as a result of AI, but they are not being eliminated. He compared AI to Excel spreadsheets, which dramatically increased the productivity of accounting and finance work.
“If you look at what your job was two years ago and what your job will be two years from now, it will be very different,” he said.
Garman also noted a shift in where humans provide the most value: Writing code itself is becoming less valuable, but engineers are still important in reviewing AI-generated code, understanding business requirements, and designing systems with AI-generated code.
As for why the company is hiring younger workers specifically, Garman acknowledged that they are among the cheapest workers to hire, but they also learn company culture faster and can embrace AI more positively than previous generations.
The CEO previously said that replacing junior employees with AI was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Without hiring graduates today, companies risk creating a long-term skills gap in the future because they have no one to train to become experienced and experienced engineers, he added.
He hinted that recruiting is becoming more about willingness to learn, not skills already mastered, but the interview ultimately confirmed the continued value of human workers.
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