- Amazon is hiring 11,000 new employees, mostly graduates and interns
- Garman says they are more impressionable and 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 an ongoing internal push for AI tools.
The news comes about six months after the company warned that 16,000 workers would lose their jobs, with Garman’s cloud business badly hit.
With the latest news, the company appears to be refocusing human resources rather than getting rid of human workers altogether as business priorities change and new opportunities open up.
Amazon to hire 11,000 workers the same year it laid off 16,000
Talking to Casey Newton of Platformer in a YouTube interview, Garman explained that white-collar jobs are changing as a result of artificial intelligence, but they are not being eliminated. He compared AI to Excel spreadsheets, which dramatically increased productivity for accounting and financial work.
“If you look at what your job was two years ago and what your job will be in two years, it will be vastly different,” he said.
Garman also noted a shift in where people bring 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 the AI-generated code.
As for why the company specifically hires junior workers, Garman acknowledged that they are among the cheapest labor to hire, but they also learn company culture faster and may embrace AI more positively than older generations.
The CEO has previously said that replacing junior staff with AI was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”
Without hiring graduates today, companies risk creating a long-term skills gap in the future because they have no one to train as senior and experienced engineers, he added.
He suggested that recruitment is more about willingness to learn, not the skills already mastered, but the interview ultimately confirmed the continued value of human workers.
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