Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
I was at a smaller public company that overhired during COVID then struggled with profits (among other things). CEO and leadership lost a ton of money due to the share price drops from COVID peaks and CEO was ultimately pushed out.
It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.
Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.
Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
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Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
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[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs