Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Tells Gen Z: You Can't Run From AI

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says young people cannot escape AI—and shouldn't want to. "You can't run away from it and you can't wish it away," Jassy said on The a16z Show last week. "It's going to be incredibly impactful in your life in every experience that you try and use in your work, and it will allow you to invent in ways that just weren't possible for us before."

Jassy, 58, leads the $2.6 trillion tech giant and took over from Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021. He earned a salary of $365,000 last year and has steered Amazon to the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500 list. The AI question is personal for him, too: he has two Gen Z children, ages 25 and 22, who are navigating the same AI revolution reshaping education and the workplace.

What does Jassy actually advise?

His message to young people, including his own kids, is direct: embrace the technology but don't let it replace the critical thinking and judgment that have long been essential to success.

"You need to learn about it, educate yourself, use it a lot. Try doing things outside your comfort zone," Jassy said. "Neither of my kids was a developer, but they've used AI to build applications. Use it as a focal point of how you operate day to day and how you use tools at work."

He stressed that embracing AI isn't just for aspiring tech workers. He encouraged young people from all backgrounds to learn the technology and experiment with what it can do.

Where does AI help—and where does it show?

Jassy, a Harvard Business School alumnus, offered business school as an example of how AI can eliminate tedious preliminary work.

"Oftentimes there were a bunch of people who just didn't do the work—they just didn't do the reading or the research or the note-taking, and all that kind of goes away with AI," Jassy said. "AI is going to be able to get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly."

But he warned against leaning too heavily on the technology. AI-generated writing can be easy to spot as "not quite right," he said, because the pieces don't fit together.

"I still think you're going to need human judgment and ingenuity and invention and experimentation and thinking about how all the pieces come together to end up building amazing experiences and businesses," Jassy said. "I think you want to use the tools, and they're going to be huge aids, but I still think critical reasoning and thinking is going to be very important in everything we do."

Amazon declined Fortune's request for comment.

Who else is pushing critical thinking?

Jassy isn't alone in urging young people to find a balance between adopting AI and preserving independent thought.

Billionaire Shark Tank star and KIND bar founder Daniel Lubetzky said critical thinking will be increasingly sought out across workplaces.

"Being a critical thinker is in high demand, and they're going to become greater demand. AI is real, but it doesn't have the creativity that humans have," Lubetzky told Fortune last year. "If, as young people, you lean into your curiosity, in your critical thinking and in your creativity, you will win."

Lubetzky's prescription for Gen Z: study history and philosophy, and question every assumption.

"Always ask why, and then go one level below double click, triple click, to the sources. Why? Why? Why? Why?" he said. "If you do that, you're going to develop a mind that's going to be able to beat anybody else and be more valuable in the workplace."

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has also emphasized skills that help young workers adapt as AI changes their jobs.

"You're going to want to be creative," Garman told CNBC last year. "You're going to want to be [good at] critical thinking. And you're going to want to be flexible."

The through-line from three of tech's most senior leaders: AI fluency gets you in the door, but the ability to reason independently is what keeps you valuable as the tools keep improving.