Matt Garman told the Wall Street Journal that AI will transform every job and every company, but argued the disruption creates more work than it destroys, provided workers are willing to keep learning.
Matt Garman, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, pushed back against warnings of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Sunday, arguing that the technology will reshape work rather than eliminate it.
Garman's position, consistent with remarks he has made across several public appearances this year, is that AI will transform every company, every job and every product interaction, but that the net effect will be an expansion of demand for human work rather than a contraction. At Amazon, he said, software developers are roughly 4.5 times more productive with AI tools, a gain he described as too large for any company to ignore and too valuable to result in mass layoffs.
"That's not an efficiency that people just give up," he said. "And I think that there's more to come."
The nuance in Garman's argument is worth noting because it is less reassuring than the headline framing suggests. He has been explicit that workers who refuse to learn new skills should "probably be nervous," and that the best advice he can offer younger workers is to "learn to learn" rather than assume any current skill set will remain relevant for the next four decades.
The comments arrive against a backdrop of genuine anxiety across the technology and services sectors. ServiceNow's stock is down 39% this year. The enterprise software sector ETF has fallen 24% in 2026. Companies from logistics firms to consulting practices are warning that AI-driven automation could reduce staffing requirements.
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Garman's counterargument is that every major technology disruption, from the internet to cloud computing, triggered the same fears and ultimately created more economic activity than it displaced. "The last big bubble we had was the internet bubble," he said. "Last I checked, the internet still is pretty big."
The message amounts to a conditional reassurance: AI will not destroy jobs in aggregate, but it will destroy specific jobs held by people who do not adapt. Whether that distinction is comforting depends entirely on which side of the adaptation curve you sit on.
