Amazon Pitches AI Tools as Co-Workers While Axing Jobs

Amazon used its annual re:Invent cloud conference in Las Vegas to pitch a vision of the workplace where AI agents serve not as tools but as 'co-workers' and 'teammates,' even as the company proceeds with eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in its second major workforce reduction in recent years.

AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous 'frontier agents' could represent 80 to 90% of enterprise AI value. Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions, described a future where companies manage 'teams' of agents capable of working autonomously for hours or days while humans shift into supervisory roles. Amazon has already deployed agentic systems across tens of thousands of its own engineers to triage outages and propose fixes. The company calls these systems 'teammates' rather than tools. CEO Andy Jassy has warned that AI would shrink Amazon's workforce, though a spokesperson attributed the current cuts to 'reducing bureaucracy' and 'removing layers' rather than AI deployment.

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