Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: Many jobs that required human effort in the past will no longer require manpower in the future.

IT Home on February 28 reported that have large-scale job losses triggered by AI already begun? In a report by Business Insider today, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy does not think so.

Anxiety among white-collar workers is growing. On Thursday local time, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced that it would lay off nearly half of its employees, reducing the total headcount from more than 10,000 to just under 6,000. During the earnings call, Jack Dorsey pointed out that as more and more companies use AI to improve efficiency, layoffs like these will become more common.

In a Friday CNBC interview, Andy Jassy candidly admitted that he has not yet “fully digested” Block’s news, but he already has clear views on how AI will change the job market: “In the past 20 or 30 years, many jobs humans have done will no longer require as many people in the future. But new roles will also emerge, and every technological change creates new careers.”

He gave an example, saying that the job of cloud solutions architect didn’t exist 15 years ago, and now there are tens of thousands of similar roles.

Jassy previously made it clear that AI would reduce some of Amazon’s white-collar positions. In a memo he sent to employees in June last year, he wrote that as AI is widely adopted within the company and brings efficiency gains, “over the next few years, the company’s overall employee headcount is expected to decrease.” It is understood that this memo once sparked strong reactions among Amazon employees, with a large number of critical voices appearing in multiple internal Slack channels.

IT Home learned from the report that AI-driven layoffs are not limited to large technology companies. For example, the AI programming startup Vercel developed an AI agent for sales and cut the original 10-person sales team down to just 1 person.

It is still unclear what new roles AI will create, and positions that have been widely discussed in the past—such as AI prompt engineers—have not formed stable demand. At the same time, AI has already driven up demand for some engineering roles, while also giving rise to new markets related to training data.

Despite this, Jassy remains optimistic about the long-term outlook. He believes the business world is in a “transformation” phase—“we will get through it together.”