'The dumbest thing I've ever heard': Amazon Web Services CEO lambasts replacing junior employees with AI, but he still loves AI

In an interview with investor and AI evangelist Matthew Berman this week, AWS CEO Matt Garman shut down the idea that junior employees should be replaced by AI, calling it "the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"They're probably the least expensive employees you have, they're the most leaned in to your AI tools, and 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?

"My view is like, you absolutely want to keep hiring kids out of college and teaching them the right ways to go build software and decompose problems and think about it."

But overall, Garman still has the optimistic take on AI's impact on the job market you commonly see from tech executives. "I think AI has the potential to transform every single industry, every single company, and every single job," Garman said. "But it doesn't mean they go away. It has transformed them, not replaced them."

He added that, "I'm not minimizing that uncertainty that people will have and I know people are worried about [AI] and I think one of the things is, embrace that technology. The more you can embrace that technology, be flexible, understand how it can help you do your job faster and better, [then] I think the better off people are going to be as they make that transition."

It's somewhat refreshing to hear a tech CEO defend entry-level jobs, especially with some estimates showing some 50% of all entry-level office jobs could be eliminated by AI in the coming years. Unfortunately, these comments come just a month after hundreds of Amazon Web Services employees were laid off. Amazon explained the layoffs in a statement to Reuters, commenting: "These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimize resources to deliver innovation for our customers."

While that statement doesn't mention AI, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made comments back in June that seemed to hint that AI will be responsible for job elimination. Jassy said in an employee memo, "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."