Why One Amazon Exec Doesn’t Want AI to Replace Junior Roles

The head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Matt Garman, said in a new interview with Wired that companies shouldn’t replace their junior employees with AI. The comment comes at the heels of an announcement from AWS in early December about its new AI tools and models.

The Strength of Junior Workers

Garman told Wired he specifically rejects the idea that companies should start operating solely through senior employees and AI agents.

He argued that younger employees have an edge: they typically know the most about how to use AI tools, and they’re less expensive to hire. For those reasons, he said eliminating that demographic of workers wouldn’t make sense.

Then there’s the issue of a lack of fresh perspectives that often comes from new employees growing under the business.

“If you have no talent pipeline that you’re building and no junior people that you’re mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that’s where we get some of the best ideas,” Garman said. “You’ve gotta think longer term about the health of a company, and just saying ‘OK great, we’re never going to hire junior people anymore,’ that’s just a nonstarter for anyone who’s trying to build a long-term company,” he said.

AWS AI Product Launch

Garman just led the launch of AI products at AWS’ cloud computing conference, re:Invent. His focus is on building AI tools for businesses that will impact how they operate and make money, according to Wired. 

One of the new tools, Nova Forge, enables users to build their own AI models from the Bedrock AWS managed services hub. Rather than incorporating company proprietary data after a model is trained, they can include it earlier on with Amazon’s Nova data sets, according to Forbes.