The Real Message Andy Jassy Is Sending to Employees on AI

Amazon’s delivery workforce is safe for now, but its office staffers need to get on the artificial-intelligence bandwagon.

Amazon reaps a relatively small amount of revenue per worker.

The Real Message Andy Jassy Is Sending to Employees on AI

Amazon chief Andy Jassy had a chilling message for employees this week: AI is coming for your jobs. But things at Amazon are more nuanced than that.

The company is unique among its big-tech peers: Amazon’s business model requires a huge number of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. The company reported 1.56 million full-time employees in its last quarterly filing—nearly seven times the total of the next-largest megacap tech giant.

That equates to nearly $417,000 in annual revenue per Amazon employee. That is actually up 43% from three years ago, when Amazon was feeling the aftermath of its Covid-era hiring binge. But it is also the lowest of that efficiency measure of any tech company producing more than $100 billion in annual sales, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta Platforms and Google-parent Alphabet all generate $1 million to $3.6 million in annual revenue per employee. Getting to even the low end of that range would require Amazon to slash more than half of its total workforce at its current sales level.

That’s not going to happen. So Jassy’s memo likely has another aim. More tech leaders are propagating the view that job security in the age of AI means learning to use it—fast. “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Milken Institute in late May.

Jassy echoed that belief in a memo to workers this week, imploring them to “be curious” about the technology. Those who do “will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company,” he wrote. By effectively threatening a pink slip to those who don’t, Jassy at least guaranteed that the AI workshops at Amazon’s offices will be humming.

Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com