AWS CEO Says AI Not ‘Taking Away Jobs’ As Company Plans 11,000 Software Hires

‘We’re still hiring software development experts too. AI isn’t killing those jobs necessarily. It’s letting them do more customer-facing or business-facing tasks versus writing code for hours and hours or working on in-house technical things that AI can do in seconds if we set it up right for them,’ one CEO at a solution provider that partners with AWS told CRN.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman is adamant that AI is not taking away jobs. In fact, Amazon is currently hiring 11,000 new software engineering interns and early-career employees, he says.

“Is AI taking away jobs? I actually see the exact inverse,” said Garman, CEO of the world’s largest cloud company and AI innovator, on stage during Amazon’s What’s Next event this week.

“When I talk to companies here in the Bay Area and when I talk to the teams in Amazon—they actually find that they’re able to attract SDEs [software development engineers]. And when the developers are coming to interview for jobs, they want to know, ‘Am I going to have access to the absolute latest development tools? Am I going to be able to use Kiro and Claude Code?’” AWS’ Garman said.

Garman said Amazon is currently hiring 11,000 new software development engineering interns and full-time early career employees.

“Like, that is not jobs going away, right?” he said, referring to the 11,000 jobs.

“I can tell you we are hiring just as many software developers as we ever had inside of Amazon,” Garman said.

Seattle-based Amazon confirmed to CRN that it’s on track to have over 11,000 interns and early-career full-time SDEs joining the company globally in 2026.

Garman: Some Developer Skills Might Be ‘Less Valuable’

The AWS CEO said it’s true that some IT expertise around certain skills that AI may be able to do itself will become less valuable.

“Maybe it’s true that, potentially, being an expert at being able to author a Java code snippet is going to be less valuable in the future than it was maybe a couple of years ago,” he said.

“But understanding how to author applications, understanding how to solve customer problems, thinking about technology and how all the pieces fit together—is more valuable than it’s ever been,” Garman said.

For example, Garman said sales professionals are thinking about leveraging AI to do their mundane tasks so they can spend more time with customers.

“If you’re a salesperson, what we’re thinking about is, ‘How do we use AI and agents to automate a bunch of the pieces? [So] how do you make sure you load your opportunities into Salesforce effectively, as opposed to freeing up our salespeople’s time to have more time to spend with customers, more time helping customers, more time explaining how customers can get value out of the cloud,” Garman said.

AWS CEO Says Jobs Are Not ‘Going Away’ Because Of AI

One CEO of a solution provider who partners with AWS agreed with Garman’s assessment that AI is not going to be a technology employment “job killer.”

“I understand what he’s saying because we see it with our own workforce [in North America], where we’re not firing people because of AI. We’re giving them AI tools so they don’t need to do things that aren’t high-level or so they don’t need to do so much internal things, which our customers don’t care about,” said the CEO, who declined to be named.

“We’re still hiring software development experts too. AI isn’t killing those jobs necessarily. It’s letting them do more customer-facing or business-facing tasks versus writing code for hours and hours or working on in-house technical things that AI can do in seconds if we set it up right for them,” he said.

Overall, Garman said jobs are not going away because of AI.

However, AI will change the day-to-day tasks employees do.

“I think that the nature of every job is going to change. But it’s not that jobs are going away. It’s just that the high value things we’re going to be able to do more of,” he said.