The e-commerce giant Amazon has unveiled innovative artificial intelligence technology designed to eliminate traditional face-to-face job interviews from its massive seasonal hiring operations.
During a Tuesday announcement in San Francisco, the Seattle-headquartered company revealed its new Connect Talent software, which can automatically conduct job interviews and screen candidates without any human participation. This development comes as Amazon regularly brings on hundreds of thousands of temporary employees each holiday season.
The company also presented its newly developed AI design approach termed “humorphism,” which Amazon describes as making artificial intelligence more human-like and ensuring technology “adapts to how humans work, not the other way around.”
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman and representatives from OpenAI participated in the announcement event. The timing follows Amazon’s February commitment to invest as much as $50 billion in OpenAI, while Microsoft recently announced it would lose exclusive rights to certain OpenAI technologies, opening doors for the ChatGPT developer to expand its customer base.
The event centered on autonomous AI software known as “agents” that can operate processes independently with minimal human oversight. These systems are designed to plan, make decisions, and take action without assistance, representing a rapidly expanding technology sector that has raised questions about safety and supervision.
Google’s parent company Alphabet recently indicated its own push into enterprise software using AI agents, joining competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in this space.
The Connect Talent platform will assist companies in locating, evaluating, and recruiting workers for large-scale hiring initiatives, particularly benefiting retailers during busy holiday periods. Through artificial intelligence capabilities, the system can perform AI-driven interviews continuously and generate recruiter notes without human involvement. Amazon brought on approximately 250,000 seasonal employees for last year’s holiday period.
AWS Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions Colleen Aubrey confirmed that job applicants would be informed about AI screening and noted ongoing improvements to make the technology sound more naturally human.
“The experience continues to get better and better each iteration we go through,” Aubrey explained during a Reuters briefing prior to the announcement. “There’s some art around making that voice interaction natural and human.”
Aubrey described Amazon’s “humorphism” concept as an effort to humanize artificial intelligence, despite widespread concerns that AI adoption could result in job displacement. The company has attributed some of the roughly 30,000 corporate positions eliminated since October to AI-driven efficiency improvements.
“How do we translate the human behaviors of working together into a product?” she asked, referring to AI development. “That’s what we’re going after and hopefully you’ll see that.”
Amazon also launched Connect Decisions on Tuesday, a new tool that can examine and organize data for supply chain planning and procurement activities. Aubrey noted that Amazon’s own supply chain operations, including materials for its warehouse network, contributed to developing this software.
Through Connect Decisions, businesses 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 explained.
