Matt Garman, Amazon’s cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don’t ditch your junior employees.
The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the “Matthew Berman” podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”
“They’re probably the least expensive employees you have. They’re the most leaned into your AI tools,” he said.
“How’s that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?”
Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.
He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren’t tied to any one college degree.
“If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you’re like, ‘That’s the thing I’m going to be expert at for the next 30 years,’ I can promise you that’s not going to be valuable 30 years from now,” he said.
Instead, he said students should focus on developing critical reasoning, creativity, and the ability to adapt as technology evolves.
Garman and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
AI is coming for junior employees
Tech leaders have been vocal about how AI could replace the work of entry-level staff.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in June that AI is already beginning to act like junior-level coworkers.
“You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees,” Altman said of AI agents during the Snowflake Summit 2025.
Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said earlier this year that AI will soon be able to replicate the skills of a junior software engineer, adding that it could happen within the next year.
The pressure is also showing up in data. According to Goldman Sachs, the unemployment rate for 20- to 30-year-olds in tech has risen by nearly 3 percentage points since early 2024, over four times the increase in the overall jobless rate.
“While this is still a small share of the overall US labor market, we estimate that generative AI will eventually displace 6-7% of all US workers,” Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, wrote in August.
Others don’t agree that junior staff are expendable.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said last month that young engineers frequently bring fresh perspectives and are more likely to have been early adopters of AI.
“Folks that go to high school now, or to college, or even kids earlier in their education, they get to use AI much faster,” Dohmke said in a July episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer.”
“They get it because they are taking this with an open mind. They don’t have the, ‘This is how we’ve always done it,'” he added.
