AWS CEO says replacing young employees with AI is ‘one of the dumbest ideas’—and bad for business: ‘At some point the whole thing explodes on itself’

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned of AI displacing entry-level workers, and Ford CEO Jim Farley said the tech will wipe out half of white-collar jobs, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has a wildly different take on young workers’ fate in the age of AI.

Last year, Garman said replacing junior software developers with AI was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” and it’s a point he stands by. In an interview with Wired, Garman said displacing junior engineers and employees with new tech is a bad business move. 

Entry-level workers are usually paid the least, meaning getting rid of their positions first in favor of higher-paid senior talent is not a cost-effective strategy, he noted. Moreso, these fresh-faced young workers are likely recent college graduates with energy, excitement, and deep familiarity with AI tools. Eliminating them, in Garman’s eyes, would be myopic.

“At some point that whole thing explodes on itself,” Garman said. “If you have no talent pipeline that you’re building and no junior people that you’re mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that’s where we get some of the best ideas.”

“You’ve gotta think longer term about the health of a company,” he added. “And just saying ‘OK great, we’re never going to hire junior people anymore,’ that’s just a nonstarter for anyone who’s trying to build a long-term company.”

In an episode of the Platformer podcast released this week, Garman said Amazon plans to hire 11,000 interns and recent graduates in 2026. The tech giant has more software developers today than two years ago, despite the advancement of AI coding tools.

Data has so far painted a muddy picture of how AI is impacting labor more broadly. A Stanford University study published last August suggested AI is already starting to have its way with entry-level workers. The research revealed that “the AI revolution” is having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” particularly 22- to 25-year-old software engineers and customer service agents.

However, while the unemployment rate for recent college graduates, about 5.6%, sits higher than the general unemployment rate of 4.2%, this gap emerged six months before the November 2022 release of ChatGPT and has not widened significantly since then, leading economists like Apollo’s Torsten Slok to attribute young people’s job struggles to broader economic factors, not AI.

What are Amazon’s workforce shakeups?

Despite Garman’s assertions that Amazon is hiring young talent, the company’s own automation advancements have coincided with the company laying off thousands of employees last fall and this January. The tech giant announced last October it would slash 14,000 jobs, mostly middle management positions. Earlier last year, Amazon laid off a smaller portion of workers from divisions including AWS, its Wondery podcast division, and the consumer devices unit. 

Rather than attribute the axings to AI, Amazon instead said the layoffs were part of an effort to make the business more efficient after a period of growth, as well as resolve cultural mismatches that emerged in the workforce.

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” CEO Andy Jassy said at the time. “It’s culture.”

Still, AI advancements are poised to impact Amazon’s workforce. The memo outlining the fall layoffs cites the transforming technology of AI as the impetus for improving workflows with leaner teams. A June 2025 memo from the company said AI efficiency gains will “reduce our total corporate workforce,” and a New York Times investigation published in October reported Amazon had a lofty goal to automate 75% of its work, translating to about 600,000 jobs the tech giant would not ultimately need to hire for.

How AI is creating a labor transformation

Garman isn’t naive to the workplace upheaval AI could bring, but he also refuses to catastrophize the future of jobs as the use of the technology proliferates. On the Platformer podcast, Garman argued AI will reshape work, but not eliminate the need for it altogether. The transformation will necessitate new jobs, and while some jobs may change, work is necessary to keep an economy in motion.

“If you believe that half of jobs get wiped out, the whole economy collapses on itself,” he said. “Everything goes away. You’re not going to have AI, and then you have to go back to those other jobs at some point. The math doesn’t work out.”

Instead, the future of tech jobs amid the AI boom could mirror the introduction of Microsoft Excel, which eliminated the need for workers making calculations manually, but encouraged others to adapt and learn the new tool.

“I do think that half of white-collar jobs may change, but wipe out and change are different,” Garman said.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Dec. 16, 2025.

More on AI and entry-level workers:

• College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams
• Gen Z graduates are blaming AI for their unemployment woes when they should be looking somewhere else
• Gen Z is over-relying on AI at work—and it could cost them their careers

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com