By Greg Bensinger
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 (Reuters) - Amazon, which hires hundreds of thousands of workers every year for the holiday rush, on Tuesday introduced new software meant to speed up the process by excising a sizable chunk of the human element: the face-to-face job interview.
The Seattle-based firm also outlined its new homegrown artificial intelligence design philosophy called "humorphism" that Amazon said helps humanize AI and "adapts to how humans work, not the other way around."
The company
announced the software offerings at an event where the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Matt Garman, as well as executives from OpenAI, are expected to appear.
Amazon in February said it would invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI and Microsoft said on Monday 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 artificial intelligence 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 signaled it is also pushing deeper into enterprise software with its own AI agents, following others like OpenAI and Anthropic.
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.
Using artificial intelligence, Connect Talent can conduct AI-led interviews around the clock and prepare notes for recruiters, all without human intervention. Amazon last year hired around 250,000 seasonal workers leading up to the holidays.
Colleen Aubrey, the 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 humanize AI, said 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 behaviors 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 Tuesday also introduced a new product called Connect Decisions, which can analyze and compile data for supply chain planning and purchasing. Aubrey said Amazon's own 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 said.
(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
