Amazon Is Hiring 11,000 Grads While Everyone Worries About AI Replacing Jobs

The hire that contradicts the headlines

Amazon plans to hire 11,000 interns and recent graduates in 2026, a number AWS CEO Matt Garman volunteered on a recent episode of the Platformer podcast as a direct answer to growing fears about AI replacing jobs for young workers. The figure lands at an odd moment. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, and most of the headlines since have followed that script. Garman's hiring number is the opposite bet: add more junior employees, not fewer.

Garman has a personal stake in the argument. He joined Amazon in 2005 as an MBA intern while studying at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, then spent nearly two decades climbing the ranks of the cloud business before becoming AWS CEO in 2024. That history shapes how directly he pushes back on the AI displacement narrative. He has described replacing junior staff with AI as one of the dumbest ideas a company could pursue, arguing that an organization with no one to mentor eventually runs out of the people who generate its best new ideas.

Why Amazon says junior hires are worth the cost

Garman's case for entry-level hiring is part economic, part cultural. Recent graduates are the cheapest labor a company can bring on, he said, and they arrive without bad habits, with a willingness to learn new tools, and without resistance to changing how work gets done. He argues the energy and fresh perspective junior employees bring is something an organization loses if it keeps recycling the same senior team year after year, calling it the difference between a team that has had the same people for 15 years and one that keeps bringing in new ideas.

The skills Amazon screens for in entry-level candidates have shifted too. Rather than weighing only the technical skills a candidate already has, Garman said the company increasingly looks for the ability to learn and adapt, on the logic that the tools graduates will be using two years from now likely do not exist yet. That framing matters for anyone applying to Amazon or a comparable employer right now: a resume built around mastery of today's tools may matter less than evidence of picking up unfamiliar ones quickly.

The numbers that complicate the optimism

Amazon's own recent history makes Garman's optimism harder to take at face value. The company cut 14,000 corporate jobs last year, and Platformer reported Amazon has shed roughly 30,000 corporate positions since October. CEO Andy Jassy has written that AI-driven efficiency gains will reduce Amazon's total corporate workforce over time, and a New York Times investigation found the company had set an internal goal of automating work equivalent to about 600,000 jobs it would otherwise need to fill.

Amazon ended 2025 with roughly 1.58 million full- and part-time workers worldwide, including about 350,000 corporate employees. Eleven thousand new graduate and intern hires is a real, specific commitment, but set against tens of thousands of corporate cuts and a stated long-term goal of shrinking the corporate workforce, Amazon's hiring plans and its layoff plans are both true at the same time. The company told Fortune it remains committed to its internship program as a pathway to finding future leaders, which is consistent with Garman's comments but does not resolve the tension with the broader headcount trend.

Amazon isn't the only company making this bet

Garman is not alone in defending entry-level hiring publicly. Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. told Fortune his company hired 20,000 entry-level college graduates in 2025 and expects that number to grow in 2026, dismissing what he called fearmongering about a collapse in junior jobs. IBM has said it plans to triple its entry-level hiring after concluding that leaning too hard on AI-driven efficiency is not a sustainable long-term talent strategy.

The pattern across all three companies looks similar: public commitments to junior hiring paired with continued, heavy AI investment and, in Amazon's case, continued layoffs elsewhere in the org. None of the three has published data tying entry-level headcount to long-term retention, promotion rates, or productivity, so for now the claims remain executive statements rather than independently verified outcomes. That distinction matters for anyone using these announcements to judge how the broader entry-level job market is actually trending.

What this means for new grads applying right now

The labor market data sits between the optimistic and pessimistic readings of this story. Unemployment for recent college graduates runs about 5.6%, higher than the general unemployment rate of 4.2%. But economists including Apollo's Torsten Slok note that gap predates the November 2022 release of ChatGPT and has not widened significantly since, which complicates any narrative that pins the entire gap on AI rather than on broader economic conditions.

For students and new grads applying to Amazon or similar employers, Garman's comments point to a practical shift in what gets candidates through the door. Technical skill checklists appear to matter less than demonstrated ability to learn fast and adopt new tools without resistance. Candidates who can show they picked up an unfamiliar tool quickly, rather than only listing tools they already know cold, are likely to read better against what Amazon, Cognizant, and IBM all say they are screening for now.

The bottom line

• Amazon plans to hire 11,000 interns and recent graduates in 2026, even as it has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since October 2025.
• AWS CEO Matt Garman argues replacing junior staff with AI removes the pipeline that produces a company's future senior talent and best ideas.
• Cognizant and IBM are making similar public commitments to entry-level hiring, but none of the three companies has published data linking junior headcount to long-term outcomes.
• Recent graduate unemployment sits at 5.6% versus 4.2% overall, a gap that predates ChatGPT and has not significantly widened since.

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