Amazon’s push to get workers to adopt AI is having adverse effects on productivity, according to The Guardian.

Amazon staff are spending time that would otherwise be used on productive work to fix errors made by internal AI tools, The Guardian reported last week. 

However, employees told The Guardian that they are increasingly feeling pressured to incorporate AI into their workflows through direct manager suggestions, internal feedback systems, tracking tools and questions about promotion consideration.

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One software developer reportedly laid off days after speaking to The Guardian, said Amazon management signaled that speed was a top priority, pitching internal AI tools to help employees go faster. However, she was quoted as saying that was not the experience of her or her colleagues with the tools.

Another software engineer reportedly told The Guardian that employees were scared that if they did not incorporate AI tools into their workflows they would be fired.

The reported pressure on employees to use AI tools may already be leading to problematic outcomes for Amazon, The Guardian said. The company’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing subsidiary has experienced at least two outages in recent months connected to the company’s growing reliance on AI, the Financial Times reported in February, citing people with knowledge of the matter. 

“The Guardian story misrepresents the impact of AI at Amazon by drawing broad conclusions from a small number of interviews,” Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told Benzinga in an emailed statement. MacLachlan said AI tools were allowing employees to free up time for creative work, adding that their use was not mandatory.

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MacLachlan also shared an Amazon statement rejecting the FT report that AI reliance has caused AWS outages.

Joint research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford University’s Social Media Lab released last year found that AI workflow integrations created more work by proliferating “workslop.”

An ongoing University of California, Berkeley, study has also found that AI makes employees work more, not less, researchers said in February. Workers increasingly found themselves taking on responsibilities beyond their job descriptions, juggling multiple workflows and handling tasks in their free time, researchers said.

The recent reports are not slowing down the rush to adopt AI, however. So-called hyperscalers, including Amazon, have committed to spending between $600 billion and $700 billion combined this year, with the bulk expected to go toward AI.

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