Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, argued that predictions of mass white-collar job losses due to AI, including warnings that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level office jobs, do not hold up under scrutiny. “If you believe that half of jobs get wiped out, the whole economy collapses on itself,” Garman said on an episode of the Platformer podcast released Tuesday. He likened the AI boom to the arrival of Microsoft Excel, which changed jobs rather than eliminating them, stating, “I do think that half of white-collar jobs may change, but wipe out and change are different.” Amazon plans to hire 11,000 interns and recent graduates this year, and employs more software developers today than it did two years ago. However, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said AI-driven efficiency gains will eventually shrink parts of the company’s corporate workforce, and last year, 14,000 corporate jobs were cut. At the end of 2025, Amazon employed roughly 1.58 million full- and part-time workers worldwide, including about 350,000 corporate employees. Garman, who joined Amazon in 2005 as an MBA intern, remains bullish on young workers, calling them “some of the very best employees you can possibly have.”