The one thing N.Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasn’t a failure to get on board with the company’s artificial intelligence plans.
Plumb, his team’s head of “AI enablement,” says he was so prolific in his use of Amazon’s new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users.Many assumed Amazon's 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassy’s push to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.” But like other companies that have tied workforce changes to AI — including Expedia, Pinterest and Dow last week — it can be hard for economists, or individual employees like Plumb, to know if AI is the real reason behind the layoffs or if it's the message a company wants to tell Wall Street.“AI has to drive a return on investment,” said Plumb, who worked at Amazon for eight years.
“When you reduce head count, you’ve demonstrated efficiency, you attract more capital, the share price goes up.”“So you could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce head count, attribute it to AI, and now you’ve got a value story,” he said.Plumb is atypical for an Amazon worker in that he's also running what he describes as a “long shot” bid for Congress in Texas, on a platform focused on stopping the tech industry's reliance on work visas to “replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor.”But whatever it was that cost Plumb his job, his skepticism about AI-driven job replacement is one shared by many economists.“We just don't know,” said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University's business school.“Not because AI isn’t great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization.
People save time and they get their work done earlier.”If an employer works faster bec...