Amazon Web Services CEO says half of white-collar jobs may 'change' due to AI — but it won't be a 'wipe-out'

Doomsday predictions about AI and jobs are massively overblown, according to Amazon chief Matt Garman.

On an episode of the Platformer podcast released on Tuesday, the CEO of Amazon Web Services pushed back on fears that artificial intelligence will decimate large swaths of the workforce.

Instead, Garman said he believes half of white-collar jobs "may change" because of AI, but that doesn't mean they'll be wiped out.

"Wipe out and change are different," Garman said, citing the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel as an example of a technology that reshaped work rather than eliminated it.

"The key thing is not to look at a still picture of the world and say that job's not going to exist, so I guess those people won't have jobs," said Garman. "New jobs will be created."

AI is already giving rise to new kinds of jobs, he said.

"What I tell people at Amazon is — there are going to be lots of jobs," Garman said, as he stressed the value of entry-level employees despite growing concerns that AI could replace junior workers.

Entry-level employees, he said, are the cheapest to hire, can be taught a company's culture, and are often eager to learn new tools.

"They're some of the very best employees you can possibly have," Garman said.

That's among the reasons why Amazon is hiring more than 11,000 software development engineering interns and early-career software development engineers globally this year, he said.

"They come in with an energy and excitement, a new view on things," Garman said of junior employees. "If you just have the exact same people you've had for the last 15 years, you don't get that energy and excitement and new ideas."

Garman said workers who are willing to learn new skills will continue to have jobs in the AI era, even if those jobs look very different from today.

"I tell all of our employees — If you look at what your job was two years ago, and you look at what your job is going to be in two years, it's going to be vastly different," he said. "You're going to have a job — you're going to have probably a more exciting and interesting job. But you're going to have to be willing to learn."

Garman also suggested that a worker's adaptability may soon matter more than any particular expertise.

"I actually think one of the things we start to look for in employees is not what skill set you have," he said, "but whether you have the ability to learn."