AWS CEO Matt Garman has said businesses are shooting themselves in the foot by replacing junior employees with AI.
If anything, he predicted, the world would need more software developers despite the take up of coding tools.
Jeff Bezos’ cloud chief told the Matthew Berman podcast that AI promised to take away “a lot of the toil” around white collar jobs, such as data entry or generating reports.
Rather, Garman suggested, people would like to work on “creative” tasks or do interesting analysis. Ultimately, AI means companies will be more efficient and able to realize value.
“I’m very optimistic that this is not everybody’s not going to have o job and robots are going to run the world.”
A transition period
That puts Garman somewhat at odds with Amazon boss Andy Jassy, who told staff last month that AI would deliver efficiency gains – and that these would ultimately lead to a smaller workforce. The company has announced multiple waves of job cuts in recent years.
Garman was more emollient saying we’re undoubtedly in a transition time and people needed to accept elements of their jobs might change.
But he said there were was no evidence of massive unemployment due to computers. He said there were lots of jobs, plenty of high paying jobs, and on average everyone is better off.
Referring to business leaders looking to replace junior employees with AI, Garman said this was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard”.
Junior workers were likely to be most “most leaned in” to AI tools. And, he said, they had the advantage of being the cheapest staff on the books.
Looking ahead, he said, “How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?
More not less
When it comes to developers specifically, he said, “My view is we’re going to need more software developers, not fewer software developers.” But, he said, the stereotype of a basement bound individual coding for weeks on end was not tenable.
Rather, people would be deconstructing problems, exploiting agents for coding, and reviewing code rather than coding Java themselves.
As for AWS, Garman said, the idea of bragging about lines of code being generated by AI was a “silly metric”. He cited the stat that 80 percent of its developers are using AI in their workflows, whether that’s for building unit tests, creating documentation or writing code.
He said companies absolutely needed to “keep hiring kids out of college and teach them the right ways to build software and decompose problems and think about it.”
More broadly young people needed critical thinking skills and the ability to develop a learning mindset. Focusing on one thing and thinking you’d do it for 30 years was a non-starter, said Garman, who began his career as an MBA intern at Amazon in 2005.
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