Amazon’s cloud chief is urging business leaders to hold on to their junior employees — and stop replacing them with AI.
On an episode of the “Matthew Berman” podcast that aired on Tuesday, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that using AI tools in place of junior employees was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard” because these employees are “the least expensive” and “the most leaned into your AI tools.”
Related: Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don’t Code — and AI Does It Instead
Garman encouraged companies to continue hiring and training their junior staff members. He asked students to focus on learning critical thinking skills instead of specializing in one field that could be obsolete within the next few decades due to AI.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman. Photo by Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services
Garman’s new remarks urging companies to hire and hold onto entry-level talent come at a time when big tech firms like Meta and Microsoft have slowed down the hiring of recent graduates. According to a report released earlier this year from SignalFire, a company that analyzes the job movements of 650 million employees on LinkedIn, new graduates comprised 7% of new hires at big tech companies last year, down from 25% in 2023.
SignalFire’s Head of Research, Asher Bantock, said that AI was a main reason for the drop in junior tech jobs, because the technology can take over routine, entry-level tasks like basic coding and research.
Related: The CEO of $61 Billion Anthropic Says AI Will Take Over a Crucial Part of Software Engineers’ Jobs Within a Year
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs researchers wrote in a note earlier this month that unemployment has risen by nearly 3% since 2024 for 20- to 30-year-olds who want to work in tech, more than four times higher than the overall rate. In the note, the company’s Chief Economist, Jan Hatzius, predicted that AI will replace up to 7% of all U.S. employees within the next decade, causing the unemployment rate to grow.
Adding to the research, some AI leaders have warned that the technology will replace entry-level jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that AI would eliminate half of junior, white-collar jobs within the next five years. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner known for his pioneering work in AI, predicted in June that AI would eventually “replace everybody” in white-collar work.
Related: Nvidia’s CEO Says It No Longer Matters If You Never Learned to Code
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained in a podcast episode last month that “the one thing we know for certain” is that people who use AI will replace those who don’t.
“If you’re not using AI, you’re going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI,” Huang said at the time.
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