Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says young people can’t run away from AI or ‘wish it away’

AI’s impact on young people isn’t just a concern for Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as he leads the $2.6 trillion tech giant. With two Gen Z children—ages 25 and 22—who are navigating the same AI revolution reshaping education and the workplace, it’s personal, too. 

Jassy’s advice to young people, including his own children, isn’t to shy away from AI. But the 58-year-old also cautioned against letting the technology replace the critical thinking and judgment that have long been essential to success.

“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,” Jassy said on The a16z Show last week. “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.”

Jassy, who took over as Amazon CEO from Jeff Bezos in 2021, earned a salary of $365,000 last year and has led the company to become No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list.

And he said that embracing AI isn’t just for aspiring tech workers. Jassy encouraged young people from all backgrounds to learn how to use the technology and experiment with what it can do.

“You need to learn about it, educate yourself, use it a lot. Try doing things outside your comfort zone,” Jassy added. “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.”

AI can eliminate grunt work—but Jassy warns that it’s easy to spot using it for writing

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,” Jassy said. “AI is going to be able to get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly.”

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. 

“I think you want to use the tools, and they’re going to be huge aids, but I still think critical reasoning and thinking is going to be very important in everything we do.”

Amazon declined Fortune’s request for comment.

Critical thinking is a top skill business leaders are looking for

Jassy isn’t alone in encouraging young people to find a happy medium between embracing the technology—but not letting it replace their ability to think independently.

Billionaire Shark Tank star and KIND bar founder Daniel Lubetzky said that critical thinking will be increasingly sought out across workplaces.

“Being a critical thinker is in high demand, and they’re going to become greater demand. AI is real, but it doesn’t have the creativity that humans have,” Lubetzky told Fortune last year. “If, as young people, you lean into your curiosity, in your critical thinking and in your creativity, you will win.”

To do so, he said Gen Z should focus on studying history and philosophy—and question any and all assumptions.

“Always ask why, and then go one level below double click, triple click, to the sources. Why? Why? Why? Why?” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to develop a mind that’s going to be able to beat anybody else and be more valuable in the workplace.” 

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has also emphasized the importance of developing skills that will help young workers adapt as AI changes the nature of their jobs.

“You’re going to want to be creative,” Garman said to CNBC last year. “You’re going to want to be [good at] critical thinking. And you’re going to want to be flexible.”

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