Amazon exec says AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs—and is hiring 11,000 grads and interns, and has more developers than 2 years ago to prove it

As Silicon Valley debates whether AI will replace millions of office workers, one of the executives building the technology’s underlying infrastructure says Gen Z shouldn’t buy into the apocalyptic job displacement predictions. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, argued that forecasts of mass white-collar job losses—including warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level office jobs—don’t hold up under scrutiny. “If you believe that half of jobs get wiped out, the whole economy collapses on itself,” Garman said on an episode of the Platformer podcast released Tuesday. “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, Garman said AI will reshape work rather than eliminate it outright. While some jobs may not exist in the future, new jobs will emerge, he argued, because economies simply depend on workers earning money and spending it. He likened the current AI boom to the arrival of Microsoft Excel, which largely replaced workers who spent their days performing calculations by hand. Those jobs changed, but workers adapted by learning new tools. “I do think that half of white-collar jobs may change, but wipe out and change are different,” Garman added. Amazon, he noted, is continuing to invest in young talent. The company plans to hire 11,000 interns and recent graduates this year, and Amazon employs more software developers today than it did two years ago—even as AI coding tools have become dramatically more capable. The transition hasn’t been painless for the No. 1 company on the Fortune 500, however. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said AI-driven efficiency gains will eventually shrink parts of the company’s corporate workforce, and last year, 14,000 corporate jobs were cut. At the end of 2025, Amazon employed roughly 1.58 million full- and part-time workers worldwide, including about 3