‘AI is going to create a labor shortage’: Jeff Bezos sees more jobs being created in the new economy, not less

The Amazon founder bets AI will create a labor shortage, not a doomsday, as he debuts Prometheus, his $41 billion startup reengineering the physical world.

For months, fearmongers have warned of AI’s “doomsday,” how it could eventually render whole swaths of the labor force unemployed and leave the rest managing AI employees. But for Jeff Bezos, those fears are overblown, and instead, AI will bring even more jobs than there are people to fill them.

Speaking Wednesday at VivaTech, the annual technology conference held in Paris, the Amazon founder and world’s fourth-richest person delivered a bullish vision of artificial intelligence’s impact on the workforce—and it’s one that he has been building toward for weeks.

“I know there’s a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant,” Bezos said in conversation with Blue Origin CEO David Limp. “I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage.”

It wasn’t the first time he made that case. In a May interview with CNBC, Bezos used a “bulldozer vs. shovel” metaphor to argue AI would uplift workers rather than replace them; predicted deflation driven by productivity gains; and specifically dismissed displacement fears about skilled workers like radiologists, and software engineers. Then, he called it “labor scarcity.”

Humans have “endless” things they want to do, Bezos said at the conference, and are currently held back only by barriers that AI will lower. Unleash those constraints, he argued, and the demand for human effort will only increase.

The remarks put him at odds with a significant share of Americans, including some of the most prominent voices in his own industry. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published this month found that half of U.S. respondents fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work. A Federal Reserve governor warned in February that a “jobless boom” leaving workers “essentially unemployable” was “totally possible.”

Even the leaders of major AI companies, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has predicted AI could cause “unusually painful” disruption across white-collar work. However, both he and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have since walked back their predictions ahead of their companies’ blockbuster IPOs.

Bezos’s comments also come at a particularly painful point in the industry. Tech layoffs through May 2026 have already surpassed 115,000, approaching the total logged in all of 2025, with Meta, Amazon, and Snap among those citing AI as a driver of cuts. Goldman Sachs has estimated AI is eliminating roughly 16,000 U.S. jobs per month, with entry-level and Gen Z workers absorbing the heaviest impact. A survey of CFOs found AI-related layoffs could run nine times as high in 2026 versus last year. Bezos instead is focusing on how industrial revolutions of the past have always created more jobs, but he notably doesn’t engage with the stats of how layoffs are affecting the industry.

Prometheus

The VivaTech stage appearance also gave Bezos a chance to talk about Prometheus, the AI startup he cofounded in November 2025 alongside former Google X scientist Vik Bajaj. The company, which has raised $12 billion at a valuation of roughly $41 billion—making it one of the largest early-stage AI fundraises in history—operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and what it calls “the physical economy.” Its target is engineering and manufacturing—in the aerospace and automotive sectors and drug development.

In another CNBC interview, he described the company as building what amounts to an “artificial general engineer”—a next-generation design tool that can model, predict, and optimize the creation of physical objects, from jet engines to pharmaceuticals. He called it “a very, very modern version of CAD.” Bezos has been at pains to correct assumptions about what Prometheus actually does. In that same May interview with CNBC, he interrupted a question that called the startup a “AI robotics” effort. “We have nothing to do with robotics,” he said.

Space exploration, Bezos said, is about saving the earth. If launch costs fall far enough, then raw materials can be sourced from asteroids, the moon, and near-earth objects, something of particular concern worldwide as the race for rare earth minerals reaches an all-time high, complete with geopolitical tensions and actual scarcity. McKinsey recently predicted there will be a 30% shortfall of magnetic rare earth minerals by 2035. Going to space, Bezos said, would even help humans by relocating their most polluting industries off-planet entirely.

“If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre–Industrial Revolution state,” Bezos said.

Limp, who appeared alongside Bezos at VivaTech, offered the first public update on the company’s recovery from a May explosion at its New Glenn launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Reconstruction of the pad has begun, Limp confirmed, though no launch timeline was given.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com