Amazon rolls out new AI mass hiring tool

SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon, which hires hundreds of thousands of workers every year for the holiday rush, on April 28 introduced new software meant to speed up the process by excising a sizeable chunk of the human element: the face-to-face job interview.

The Seattle-based firm also outlined its new home-grown artificial intelligence design philosophy called “humorphism” that Amazon said helps humanise 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) chief executive Matt Garman, as well as executives from OpenAI, were expected to appear.

Amazon in February said it would invest up to US$50 billion (S$64 billion) in OpenAI and Microsoft said on April 27 it would lose exclusive access to some of OpenAI’s technology, clearing the path for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products to others.

A focus of the event is autonomous AI software, known as agents, that can run processes with little to no human intervention. The hope is that such agents can plan, decide and act on their own, a fast-growing field that has also sparked concerns over safety and oversight.

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

Amazon’s new mass hiring software, called Connect Talent, will help firms find, screen and recruit workers needed for large-scale hiring, such as retailers during the peak holiday selling season.

Connect Talent can conduct AI-led interviews around the clock and prepare notes for recruiters, all without human intervention. In 2025, Amazon hired about 250,000 seasonal workers leading up to the holidays.

Ms Colleen Aubrey, AWS senior vice-president of applied AI solutions, said job candidates would know they are being screened using AI and acknowledged it was 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 is an attempt to humanise AI, said Ms Aubrey, even as the broad adoption of the technology has sparked concerns it could lead to job losses. Indeed, the company has tied some of the roughly 30,000 corporate jobs it cut since October to efficiencies gained through AI use.

“How do we translate the human behaviours 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 on April 28 also introduced a new product called Connect Decisions, which can analyse and compile data for supply chain planning and purchasing.

Ms Aubrey said Amazon’s supply chain experiences, such as materials for its network of warehouses, helped create 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 added. REUTERS