AWS CEO Matt Garman: Hiring Fresh Graduates Essential Despite AI Fears
Amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence could replace junior workers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has stressed the importance of hiring entry-level employees, arguing that choosing not to would be a mistake.
Stating that doomsday predictions about AI and jobs are massively overblown, Garman said that he believes half of white-collar jobs will not be wiped out because of AI; instead, they may change due to the technology. The Amazon chief made these remarks in an appearance on the Platformer podcast on Tuesday, June 23.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously grabbed headlines after predicting that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. When asked about Amodei's prediction by Casey Newton, host of the podcast, Garman responded that 'wipe out' and 'change' are two different things. He cited the example of how spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel 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. New jobs will be created. I firmly believe this. If you believe half of jobs get wiped out, then the whole economy collapses on itself and everything goes away, and then you're not going to have AI, and you have to go back to those other jobs at some point. The math doesn't work out,” Garman said.
The potential impact of AI on the jobs landscape has broadly divided the tech industry into two camps. While some like Dario Amodei have warned that AI may eliminate 50 per cent of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, others like Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis believe that AI will bring dramatic advances and a possible future of “radical abundance” despite acknowledged risks. Garman's view that AI will lead to new types of jobs broadly aligns with opinions expressed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang.
Amazon started the year by cutting 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025. It has shrunk its corporate workforce by nine per cent in three months. The first round of layoffs was attributed to generative AI. “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… 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,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025. However, the company said that the January layoffs were part of its efforts to “strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
According to Garman, entry-level employees are the cheapest to hire, can be taught a company's culture, and are often eager to learn new tools. “This is the reason we're hiring 11,000 interns and new college grads this year at Amazon. They come in with an energy and excitement, a new view on things,” Garman said.
“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. So personally I find that logic to be faulty. If you look at the exact snapshot of the jobs that existed 10 years ago, some of those may go away. But they're going to be replaced by hopefully better and more interesting and exciting jobs,” he added.
A worker's willingness to learn new skills will help them continue to have jobs in the AI era, even if those jobs look very different from today, as per Garman. “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. You're going to have a job, but it's not going to be the same job. You need to be willing to adapt and learn,” he said.
