Amazon targets mass hiring with agentic software, goal to humanize AI

Amazon, which hires hundreds of thousands of workers each year for the holiday rush, on Tuesday introduced new software intended to speed up the process by excising a sizable chunk of the human element: the face-to-face job interview.

The Seattle-based firm also introduced its new in-house artificial intelligence (AI) design philosophy called "humorphism," which Amazon says helps humanize AI and "adapts to how humans work, not the other way around."

The company announced the software offerings at an event where Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman, as well as executives from OpenAI, are expected to attend.

In February, Amazon announced it would invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, and Microsoft said on Monday it would lose exclusive access to some of OpenAI's technology, paving the way for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products to others.

A key focus of the event is autonomous AI software, known as "agents," which can run processes with little to no human intervention. The goal is for these agents to plan, decide, and act independently, a rapidly growing field that has also raised safety and oversight concerns.

Alphabet last week signaled it is also pushing deeper into enterprise software with its own AI agents, following others like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Amazon's new mass hiring software, called Connect Talent, will assist companies in finding, screening, and recruiting workers needed for large-scale hiring, such as retailers during the peak holiday selling season.

Using AI, Connect Talent can perform AI-led interviews around the clock and generate notes for recruiters, all without human intervention. Amazon hired around 250,000 seasonal workers last year for the holidays.

Colleen Aubrey, the AWS senior vice president of applied AI solutions, said job candidates would know they are being screened using AI and acknowledged that it is still being refined to sound more convincingly human.

"The experience continues to get better and better each iteration we go through," she said in a briefing with Reuters before the event. "There's some art around making that voice interaction natural and human."

Amazon's "humorphism" philosophy aims to make AI more human-like, said Aubrey, even though widespread use of the technology has raised concerns about potential job losses. In fact, the company has linked some of the roughly 30,000 corporate layoffs since October to efficiencies achieved through AI.

"How do we translate the human behaviors of working together into a product?" she said, referring to AI. "That's what we're going after and hopefully you'll see that."

The company also announced a new product called Connect Decisions on Tuesday, which is designed to analyze and compile data for supply chain planning and purchasing. Aubrey said Amazon's own supply chain experiences, such as sourcing materials for its network of warehouses, helped develop the new software.

With Connect Decisions, companies will be "able to have AI do that work behind the scenes and be able to equip a planner with the data that they need," she said.