Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says young people can’t run away from AI or ‘wish it away’—but they shouldn’t let it do this one thing

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is telling young people to stop treating AI like a threat to dodge. His message is blunt: you can’t run away from it, and you can’t wish it away. The technology, he says, is going to shape work and daily life whether people like it or not.

That advice lands a little differently coming from someone running Amazon, the $2.6 trillion company he took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021. Jassy, who has two Gen Z children ages 25 and 22, said he gave them the same warning on The a16z Show last week. He pushed them to learn the tools, use them a lot, and try things outside their comfort zone. Even his kids, he said, have used AI to build applications without being developers.

But he drew a line. AI can handle the grunt work — reading, research, note-taking, the kind of preliminaries that used to chew up hours in business school. It can also get people to an advanced starting point much faster. What it can’t do, Jassy said, is replace human judgment, ingenuity, experimentation, and the ability to see how the pieces fit together.

That warning is especially pointed for writing, where he says AI output is often easy to spot because it feels “not quite right.” The point isn’t to avoid the tool. It’s to avoid outsourcing the thinking.

Jassy isn’t alone in saying that. Daniel Lubetzky has argued that critical thinking will be even more valuable as AI spreads, and AWS chief Matt Garman has also stressed creativity, flexibility, and critical thinking. The message from the top is getting louder: learn the machine, but don’t become one.