Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has already warned that AI could displace early-career workers, and Ford CEO Jim Farley has said the technology will eliminate half of white-collar jobs. But Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has a radically different view on the fate of young workers in the age of AI.
Last year, Garman said that replacing junior software developers with AI was “one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard,” and he stands by that assessment. In an interview with WiredGarman said trading junior engineers and early-career employees for new technology is a bad business decision.
Entry-level workers often receive the lowest salaries, which means eliminating these positions first in favor of higher-paid senior talent is not a cost-efficient strategy, he noted. Additionally, these young, newly arrived professionals, likely fresh out of college, bring energy, enthusiasm, and great familiarity with AI tools. Eliminating them, in Garman’s view, would be a short-term mistake.
“At some point, this whole thing implodes in on itself,” Garman said. “If you’re not building a pipeline of talent and you don’t have junior people to mentor and develop within the company, that’s often where some of the best ideas come from.”
“You need to think long-term about the health of a company,” he added. “Simply saying, ‘Great, we’re never going to hire junior people again’ is out of the question for anyone trying to build a long-term company.”
In a podcast episode Platformer released this week, Garman said Amazon plans to hire 11 thousand interns and recent graduates in 2026. The technology giant now has more software developers than it had two years ago, despite the advancement of AI tools for programming.
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So far, the data paints a murky picture about how AI is affecting the job market more broadly. A Stanford University study published last August suggested that AI is already starting to affect early-career workers. Research has shown that “the AI revolution” is having a “significant and disproportionate impact on early-career workers in the US job market,” especially software engineers and customer service agents aged 22 to 25.
However, although the unemployment rate among recent higher education graduates, around 5,6%is above the general unemployment rate, 4,2%this difference emerged six months before the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and has not increased significantly since then. This has led economists like Apollo’s Torsten Slok to attribute young people’s difficulties in getting jobs to broader economic factors rather than AI.
What are the changes to Amazon’s workforce?
Although Garman claims that Amazon is hiring young talent, the company’s own automation advances coincided with layoffs of thousands of employees last fall and in January of this year. Last October, the technology giant announced that it would cut 14 thousand jobsmainly in middle management positions. Early last year, Amazon also laid off a smaller portion of workers from divisions such as AWS, the Wondery podcast division and the consumer devices unit.
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Rather than attribute the cuts to AI, Amazon said the layoffs were part of an effort to make the business more efficient after a period of growth, as well as correct cultural misalignments that had arisen in the workforce.
“The announcement we made a few days ago wasn’t really driven by financial reasons, and not even driven by AI — at least not right now,” CEO Andy Jassy said at the time. “It’s culture.”
Still, AI advances are expected to impact Amazon’s workforce. The memo detailing the fall layoffs cites transformative AI technology as the impetus for improving workflows with leaner teams. A June 2025 company memo stated that AI efficiency gains will “reduce our total corporate workforce,” and an investigation by the New York Times published in October reported that Amazon had an ambitious goal of automating 75% of your workwhich would be equivalent to approximately 600 thousand vacancies that the technology giant would end up not needing to fill.
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How AI is transforming work
Garman is not naive about the upheavals that AI could bring to the workplace, but he also refuses to treat the future of employment as catastrophic as the use of the technology spreads. On the podcast Platformerhe argued that AI will reshape work but not eliminate its need entirely. The transformation will require new roles, and while some jobs may change, work remains necessary to keep the economy moving.
“If you believe that half the jobs are going to disappear, the entire economy will collapse,” he said. “Everything disappears. You’re not going to have AI and that’s it; at some point, you’d have to go back to those other jobs. The math doesn’t add up.”
Instead, the future of tech jobs amid the AI boom may look like the introduction of Microsoft Excel, which eliminated the need for workers to do calculations manually but encouraged others to adapt and learn to use the new tool.
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“I do think half of white-collar jobs can change, but eliminating and changing are different things,” Garman said.
A version of this report was published in Fortune.com em December 16, 2025.
This story was originally published on Fortune.com.
