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Today I woke to find that yet another CEO has written yet another memo about how head over heels in love they are with AI. This time, the memo was from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. It was posted publicly to Amazon’s website on Tuesday. Tech CEOs have been rattling off these love letters from time to time lately, and they usually sound similar: They talk about how the technology is transformative, how chatbots will somehow benefit customers, how it will make their company more efficient because AI will enable them to lay off more humans, and, most ominously, how this is just the beginning.” We get the gist: CEOs of large companies love the bottom line and AI is going to do wonders for it. But since Jassy is the CEO of the largest online retailer on the planet, his all-too-samey memo raises a burning question: Who is going to buy all of Amazons products once AI takes most of our jobs? Jassy does admit in the memo that AI is going to cost people jobs at Amazon. Speaking about how the company is rolling out AI agentsartificially intelligent programs that will do the work a company used to pay human workers to doJassy said that Amazon will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. He goes on: Its hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. Jassy is likely right that AI is going to reduce the total corporate workforce, but not just at Amazon. AI will reduce the total workforce at many companies in the years ahead, likely the majority of them. How bad could things get? Estimates vary, but a 2023 report from investment bank Goldman Sachs said that AI could threaten 300 million jobs over a 10-year period. A 2017 report from McKinsey stated that the automation of jobs could result in between 400 million and 800 million individuals being displaced by 2030. Automation refers to the process by which code or robotics perform a task that a human was once required for, and often at a much lower operating cost than what a company would need to pay an individual. So, again, if every company in the world does what Amazon plans to doreplace workers with AIand that does lead to a potential billion or so white-collar workers seeing their jobs evaporate, who exactly is Amazon going to sell to? Honest question. Once AI is doing all the work, and humans can no longer earn a paycheck, who buys Amazons stuff? Does AI start trying to sell cheap goods to other AI? I mean, surely AI has no use for clothes, sporting goods, or shampoo. And it doesnt have any need for the books, movies, or art prints that Amazon sells because, lets be honest, AI models have already stolen most of that stuff. It knows them so well that it can replicate them instantly. AI might be a good workerand great for a companys bottom linebut it’s the worst customer a company could ask for. So if AI cant buy Amazons stuff, and human workers are now unemployable because AI took their jobs, who shops at Amazon, then? Thats something that none of the CEOswho seem so determined to be seen as AI thought leaders every time they rattle off one of these AI love lettersever address in these memos. If theres one thing that humans can take heart inat least for nowit’s that some companies that have already announced their plans to go all in on AI at the expense of their employees’ livelihoods have faced public backlash for it. But I think thats a problem companies may solve as AI advances. As for what happens to these companies bottom lines once consumers can no longer afford to buy their products because AI has taken their jobs? Well, Im still waiting to hear CEOs offer a solution to that problem.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs; this week Im dropping a few extra newsletters from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. To hear the creative leaders assembled at Cannes Lions this week, reports of the advertising industrys death by AI are greatly exaggerated. In keynote speeches and panel discussions, advertising and marketing executives say they are wholeheartedly embracing generative AI as a partner they are integrating into their work. In 2023, AI were the two most-used letters at Cannes, Josh Rosenberg, cofounder and CEO of Day One Agency, an independent creative and communications shop, tells Modern CEO. Fast-forward two years, and the conversation has evolved from novelty to practicality. Weve moved beyond the hype into implementation, and with that comes a more grounded understanding of both the potential and the limitations of the technology. The AI advantage Susan Howe, CEO of the Weber Shandwick Collective, says the communications advisory group uses GenAI to create synthetic personas to understand how different demographics and constituencies might respond to a clients message. Other executives have talked about using AI to review written work to query what questions they forgot to ask or topics they failed to address. The AI enthusiasm is tempered by an admittedly self-serving belief that the technology is a tool that will helpnot replacethe human touch. The good news is AI is not going to kill advertising, declared Tor Myhren, Apples vice president of marketing communications, in his keynote speech here. The bad news is AI is not going to save advertising. Weve got to save ourselves by believing in whats always made this industry special: human creativity. Day Ones Rosenberg concurs, noting, The dominant theme at Cannes isnt just what AI can do but how it should coexist with human creativity. AI will never replace our most powerful creative asset: emotion. It can accelerate workflows and expand possibilities, but it cant replicate taste, intuition, or the spark that makes a piece of work truly move people. Exceptional work still requires humans Of course, Rosenbergs and Myrens organizations are responsible for award-winning, groundbreaking campaigns that embody the ingenuity, heart, and humor that feel viscerally humanat least for now. Apple is the 2025 Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year, and Day One was short-listed in the last year for a Chipotle social campaign. So while a computer might not be able to conceive, script, shoot, edit, and recruit talent such as Pedro Pascal to star in a short film promoting AirPods, it is pretty easy to imagine GenAI capably replacing mediocre or uninspiring advertisingof which there is plenty. In fact, AI is just one of the forces buffeting the ad business: The large holding companies that dominate the industry are consolidating (Omnicom late last year agreed to acquire rival Interpublic Group, prompting fears of layoffs). Taking the lessons from AI in advertising What lessons can the rest of the business world learn from advertisings experiences with AI? Companies in the space have successfully moved beyond proof of concept into adoption of the technology, but whats perhaps most striking is the way AI has galvanized agencies and brands to move quickly and take risks. In an environment where products and services need to constantly differentiate and reach new audiences, such nimbleness is a good skill to havewhether or not your company is responding to the potential disruption of AI. Read more: creativity at work Where the design jobs are in 2025 121 Brands That Matter How MNTN is bringing creativity to small business
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E-Commerce
Including women in corporate boardrooms does more than diversify leadershiprecent research shows it can also lead to safer job sites, potentially saving companies from costly safety incidents. Companies with more women on their boards tend to have fewer workplace safety incidentsespecially when these women hold positions of power within the board, according to an analysis of workplace safety at 266 companies between 2002 and 2011. These findings were published in April in the Journal of Operations Management. “What’s cool about this paper is . . . by exploring the human element, it really sheds a new light on the firm’s operations and why there’s variability in different operational processes,” said study coauthor Kaitlin Wowak, an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Notre Dame. Companies in the U.S. spend more than a billion dollars each week on workplace safety incidents. These incidentswhich range from strikes and shutdowns to worker injuriescause reputational harm and lost profits and can lead to loss of life or limb for employees. Learning more about how workplace leadership impacts safety is one step toward mitigating these harms. To gauge differences in workplace safety between the companies analyzed, the study authors examined data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), director-level information from Institutional Shareholder Services, and regulatory violation data from the Violation Tracker database. They found boards with more women had fewer recorded incidents. These safety benefits were even more pronounced when women held positions of power on the board, such as seats on influential committees, researchers found. When women have these positions of power, they are not only able to express their perspectives more freely, but others also pay more attention to their ideas, explained Corinne Post, coauthor of the study and professor of business leadership, management, and operations at Villanova University. The researchers theorize that the difference in safety outcomes between boards with and without women may come down to men and women having different socio-cognitive approaches to stakeholder concerns, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance. These different approaches stem from having different experiences to bring to boardroom discussions. Women are, for example, more likely to have experience with community outreach and philanthropy, researchers note in the study. Having these different specialties and experiences represented in decision-making are a benefit of diversified leadership more broadly, the researchers say. “It’s not just gender diversity, too, it’s all forms of diversity [that are important],” Wowak said. “When you have different backgrounds and different cognitions, you bring a different perspective to decision making that’s truly beneficial.” This research is the first to establish a link between operational safety and diversity in upper leadership, adding to a growing literature that provides the business case for diverse leadership. I was happy to see the findings, but not surprised, said Michael Abebe, a professor of management at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who researches diversity in business leadership. He said the new study shows another facet of the benefits gender diversity in leadership can bring to a companyand how the research focus on diversity in leadership has changed over time. Abebe mentions that for many years, studies about diversity in leadership generally focused on the glass ceiling, an invisible barrier that keeps women and minorities out of leadership even in otherwise diverse professions. But over the years, the field of study evolved to focus on the business case of diversifying companiesand how more diverse leaders can lead to positive business outcomes. The paper’s authors acknowledge that this field of study is relatively new and say there is still a lot to explore at the board level and beyond. There are multiple different echelons that future scholars should explore, because they all impact a firms operations in potentially different ways, Wowak said. For companies looking to turn these present and future research findings into real change, Abebe recommends “rethinking how we recruit, where we recruit, and go beyond the conventional to create more pathways to the top for women in the workforce. Having women on the board does present an opportunity to really run better businesses, Post said. It’s not just about putting women in there . . . but it’s putting them in a position where they can actually voice their ideas more.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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