- Amazon is hiring 11,000 new workers, mostly new graduates and interns
- Garman says they're 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 grads this year despite an ongoing internal push for AI tools.
The news comes around six months after the company warned that 16,000 workers would be losing their jobs, with Garman's cloud business hit hard.
With the latest news, the company looks to be refocusing human resources instead of getting rid of human workers altogether as business priorities change and new opportunities open up.
Amazon to hire 11,000 workers in the same year it laid off 16,000
Speaking with Casey Newton of Platformer in a YouTube interview, Garman explained that white-collar jobs are changing as a result of AI, but they're not being eliminated. He compared AI to Excel spreadsheets, which dramatically increased productivity for accounting and finance work.
"If you look at what your job was two years ago, and what your job is going to be in two years, it's going to be vastly different," he said.
Garman also noted a shift in where humans bring the most value – writing code itself is becoming less valuable, but engineers are still important reviewing AI-generated code, understanding business requirements and designing systems with the AI-generated code.
As for why the company is hiring junior workers specifically, Garman acknowledged that they're among the cheapest labor to hire, but they also learn company culture faster and can embrace AI more positively than older generations.
The CEO previously said that replacing junior employees 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 nobody to train into senior and experienced engineers, he added.
He implied that recruitment is becoming more about a willingness to learn, not the skills that have already been mastered, but the interview ultimately confirmed the continued value of human workers.
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