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Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings! The tech industry has spent the past few years telling everyone that the artificial intelligence tools they’re building are about to change the world. But until recently executives at the largest tech firms haven’t been willing to spell out what exactly that means for the hundreds of thousands of white-collar staffers at their own companies. Earlier this year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told a podcaster his company might not hire any new engineers this year because of “incredible productivity gains” from AI tools. And today Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke out on the subject in a companywide memo. Sandwiched between effusive praise for Amazon’s AI products, like Alexa and Bedrock, and recommendations that employees “be curious about AI,” Jassy finally said what AI tools will mean for Amazon: AI is going to replace corporate jobs. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote. “It’s 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’s note will probably be welcome news to Amazon shareholders and unnerving to many white-collar workers inside and outside the company. But it’s worth teasing out what’s actually novel here. After all, Amazon’s emphasis on cutting corporate head count is nothing new. The company has been slashing corporate jobs for years, including through mass layoffs in 2022 and 2023 and a war on bureaucracy that Jassy declared last fall. That’s already reduced its overall head count—the number of people Amazon employed at the end of 2024 was roughly flat compared to the preceding two years and about 50,000 below a peak of 1.6 million staff in 2021, according to corporate filings, though those figures include both corporate and blue-collar staff. At the same time, Amazon and its rivals are pouring tens of billions of dollars apiece this year into AI and cloud-related capital expenditures. At some point, all that spending has to translate into revenue. And there’s no better way for Amazon to sell its AI tools to clients than to point to all the jobs it’s been able to cut within its own ranks as a result of the technology. There’s almost certainly a similar dynamic at play at Microsoft, where an executive touted the productivity benefits of OpenAI-powered tools shortly before laying off staff, my colleague Aaron Holmes reported in May. There’s growing evidence that AI products are making some white-collar workers more productive. But it’s worth keeping in mind that big tech firms have an incentive these days to attribute every job cut they make to AI, regardless of whether that’s true. Expect more memos like Jassy’s from other tech executives in the future. Another reminder to always be careful about universalizing your own experience: I had long assumed many elderly people would be turned off by the complexities of using apps on smart televisions, given my own difficulty in getting an aging parent comfortable with streaming services on their TV. But today Nielsen is out with a new report that contains some eye-opening stats. Among them: The number of viewers over 65 watching YouTube on TV grew 106% last month compared to the same month two years earlier, making them the fastest-growing age group for the app on TVs, according to a New York Times story about the report. The growth in older viewers is one reason the audience for streaming on televisions surpassed the combined audience for broadcast and cable for the first time ever last month, according to Nielsen. It turns out older viewers love free streaming services like YouTube, Tubi and Pluto and don’t appear to be bothered so much by the preponderance of ads on them, which most of them are accustomed to seeing on traditional television. And those services are also giving them reruns of familiar shows: Lately, “Gunsmoke,” a Western show that ended in 1975, has been showing up on Nielsen’s list of most-watched TV series on streaming, according to The Times.—Nick Wingfield • The Senate passed legislation known as the Genius Act that will establish federal rules on stablecoins. The bill still requires approval in the House of Representatives, along with President Donald Trump’s signature. • Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion from equity investors, in addition to discussions about borrowing $5 billion from debt investors, Bloomberg reported. • The U.S. Department of Defense awarded OpenAI a one-year contract worth $200 million to provide the military with AI tools. AI Agenda by Stephanie Palazzolo separates hype from reality and explains how AI is transforming industries. 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