Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a message for young people, including his own children. Don’t shy away from AI, he says, but don’t let it replace the critical thinking and judgment that have long driven success. The advice is personal for Jassy, who runs the $2.6 trillion tech giant. His two Gen Z children, aged 25 and 22, are navigating the same AI revolution that is reshaping education and the workplace. He said that embracing AI isn’t just for aspiring tech workers, and encouraged young people from all backgrounds to learn how to use the technology and experiment with what it can do.
“Well, I have a 25 and a 22 year old. I guess the 22-year-old was 19 when this was starting to really take off. And I learned very quickly that you can't tell them not to use AI in education. That train has left the station and universities would be wise not to fight it,” Jassy said on The a16z Show recently.
“And I just think it's a tool that people are going to use. And yet at the same time, I would say, for us, where we have a lot of people who are using AI to write. You can tell when something's been written by AI. You know, it's not quite right.
The advice I would give somebody young and I gave my kids was you can’t run away from it and you can’t wish it away. It’s going to be incredibly impactful in your life in every experience that you try and use in your work, and it will allow you to invent in ways that just weren’t possible for us before,” he added.
“You need to learn about it, educate yourself, use it a lot. Try doing things outside your comfort zone. Neither of my kids was a developer, but they’ve used AI to build applications. Use it as a focal point of how you operate day to day and how you use tools at work,” Jassy added.
AI can eliminate grunt work but Jassy has a warning
Jassy, an alumnus of Harvard Business School, offered business school as an example of how AI can eliminate tedious preliminary work.
“Oftentimes there were a bunch of people who just didn’t do the work—they just didn’t do the reading or the research or the note-taking, and all that kind of goes away with AI. AI is going to be able to get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly,” Jassy said.
While AI can help people get to speed faster, Jassy also warned against leaning too heavily on the technology. AI-generated writing, in particular, can be easy to spot as “not quite right,” he said, because the pieces don’t quite fit together.
“I still think you’re going to need human judgment and ingenuity and invention and experimentation and thinking about how all the pieces come together to end up building amazing experiences and businesses,” Jassy said.