Earlier this year Amazon cut 16,000 jobs, citing artificial intelligence among the main causes. The problem is that in June its founder, Jeff Bezos, took the stage in Paris to argue the exact opposite: AI will not destroy work, it will end up creating a labor shortage. It is a contradiction that captures perfectly the confusion running through the 2026 job market.

On June 17, at VivaTech in Paris, the Amazon founder shared the stage with David Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, to talk about Prometheus, his new AI-based engineering startup. The company was unveiled on that occasion with a valuation of $41 billion and $12 billion already raised in funding. What made headlines, however, was something else Bezos said.

«I know there’s a lot of concern, shared even by smart people, that AI could make humans superfluous», he said. «I completely disagree. I think artificial intelligence will create a labor shortage, because it will allow people to identify a greater number of problems to solve. We have an endless list of things to invent, and today we are not limited by our imagination but by what we can actually build».

Bezos’ reasoning rests on an economic principle known as the Jevons paradox: when a tool becomes cheaper and more efficient, people end up using it more, not less. His favorite example is the ATM. When cash machines were introduced, banks did not lay off tellers en masse — they opened more branches and hired more customer-facing staff, because the operating cost of each branch had fallen.

According to Bezos, the same could happen with radiologists and software engineers, who would be elevated in their roles rather than replaced. The problem is that while Bezos paints an optimistic picture of the future of work, the data coming out of the tech sector tells a very different story about the first five months of 2026.

A sector laying off at record pace

The industry has already cut 115,000 jobs, a pace that by May had nearly matched the total for all of 2025. In the United States, roughly 97,000 layoffs were recorded last year. Companies pointed to artificial intelligence as the main cause in 38,579 cases — about 40% of the total, and the highest monthly reading ever recorded for that reason.

Goldman Sachs estimates that artificial intelligence is contributing to the elimination of about 16,000 jobs a month in the United States. Another survey attributes 22% of all layoffs planned over the course of 2026 to AI.

The infrastructure keeps spending, the market keeps re-pricing

If artificial intelligence really does end up generating greater demand for human labor, the infrastructure that supports it is meanwhile going through an investment cycle that many analysts expect to last for decades. Nvidia is up 13.25% year to date, Broadcom 15.99% and Alphabet 14.26%. Microsoft, paradoxically, is lagging with a 20.02% decline: a reminder that even the companies building AI’s infrastructure are not immune to being re-priced by the market.

On the reskilling front, Coursera recorded more than 20 new sign-ups per minute for its generative AI courses in the first quarter of 2026. It is a signal that millions of people are already moving to acquire new skills.

The roles most exposed are clearly the entry-level ones, built on repetitive, low-specialization tasks. Among the jobs likely to hold up, by contrast, are the supervisors tasked with checking the quality of AI systems, specialized engineers, and roles tied to professional training.

It is possible that Bezos is right about where the labor market ultimately lands. But the more urgent question remains open — the one that concerns the people who have already lost their jobs in 2026: how long will it take before the labor shortage promised by the Amazon founder becomes something more concrete than an optimistic forecast delivered on a stage in Paris?

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Alessandro Nuzzo on July 14, 2026 as «Amazon taglia 16.000 posti di lavoro, ma Bezos prevede che l’AI creerà una carenza di manodopera». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.