“Is the new agentic AI going to take your job? Well, maybe”, the challenge that almost no one talked about during the Amazon mega convention

Throughout the current edition, the only thing that was talked about was agentic AIan evolution of Artificial Intelligence that has been applied massively and aims to go from creating things (whether images or email summaries) to fully entering into making operational decisions in companies, to automate processes, reduce costs and increase productivity.

Says Vogels, jokingly displaying a photo of a real elephant on the screen in the background: “Is agentic AI going to take my job? Well, probably,” he risks.

The possibilities that agentic AI can bring in the near future dominated the re:Invent conversation from end to end. Almost 60 percent of the more than 3,100 talks that were given in the five days that the event lasted revolved around the topic.

The conference is and Lollapalooza of technicians, engineers and sales people who flood the halls of the largest hotels in “Sin City” to participate in the training activities offered by AWS and see how they can get their companies to start applying some of the solutions to win (or not disappear) in an increasingly competitive market. Banking, media, pharmaceuticals, defense, logistics, there are representatives from all areas.

However, none of the presentations hear talk about the jobs that may fall by the wayside, or how to retrain that workforce, a concern noted by the World Economic Forum in its 2025 report on labor market trends. According to their calculations, the implementation of AI and another series of technological transformations They can create about 11 million new jobs, but they can cause another 9 million to be lost. Of those, at least 5 million are expected to disappear due to automation. “It is the largest factor of all,” the report states.

“Yes, we definitely heard that sentiment about jobs,” Dave Levy, global vice president of Public Sector at AWS, responded to the question. Clarion about the risks. “But I think,” says Levy, “that agentic AI is going to be an opportunity for workers to focus on things they haven’t been able to focus on before because it will help rethink what they are doing. You can put those workers and retrain them on more productive things,” he says.

In his reading, agentic AI has the possibility of helping people to be more creative. “There will be new opportunities for workers to go to different tasks and different roles. The radiology is a great example. Reading an x-ray to identify a very small portion of the pathology can take a long time. AI can eliminate a lot of that and tell the professional ‘this is the area you need to focus on.’ “I definitely think there are opportunities with AI to improve productivity and to create new opportunities for workers,” he ventures.

Reentrenar (rescission) to the workforce to adapt to the changes of the times is one of the points on which the speakers of the convention agree with the report of the World Economic Forum, launched in January of this year. According to the paper’s estimates, Of every 100 employees there are now, 59 will need training in the next five years. But within that group, about 11 are at risk of not being able to receive training that makes them capable, putting their jobs in jeopardy.

“Unfortunately the change is already here, that is, we are going to have to adapt to that change in some way,” says Enrique Phun, senior software and Cloud from the market research firm IDC. “But I can tell you that also if you see in history, every time there was a new technology that one would have thought that everything would now disappear, humans have that peculiarity of adapting,” he maintains.

“We return to the topic of rescission and reinvention. I meanyou can lose that job. But I think the opportunity is to look for that new reinvention. We are going to have a hybrid system in which you will always need that human, people who understand that artificial intelligence,” he says.

“One of the areas where it is most seen (the entry of AI) is in marketing, writing or programming. It is not going to disappear, it is being re-transformed. What is not clear is where it is being re-transformed,” adds Danielle Ibran, also an IDC analyst.

“That’s where I think the person’s creativity comes in to use the tool to increase the value, that difference that it has. If a programmer is good, with those tools he will become better. Otherwise, if you have a worker who is average, The only thing the tool is going to do is show that type of behavior he has,” he warns.

The point of view had been explored by AWS CEO Matt Garman in his keynote opening. For him, the great advance of agentic AI and some solutions that they launched this year will be to give workers more tools to be able to find new solutions in their jobs. One of them was Kiro, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed to help developers communicate more precisely with Artificial Intelligence and move faster from the prompting stage to the prototype.

He also focused on the objective of ensuring that AWS customers have their own AI agents, AI models trained in specific solutions for their areas, that work side by side automating tasks and looking for how to improve processes. He leitmotif during his presentation (and which crossed the spirit of the entire week) was summarized in an opening phrase: “Why not exceed the possible? Why not?”

The feeling that runs through the different specialists consulted is one of optimism, in contrast to the anxiety that it generates among employees and young people who are looking to enter the labor market. According to a report presented this week by the Harvard Kennedy School Policy Institute, 59 percent of young people (in the US) believe that AI is a threat to their careersas more and more front-end tasks are done by AI tools, shrinking the job market.

“What we tell companies and organizations is that There’s really no way you can consider planning five years into the future today, because things will change in two, in one.”says Fabio Filho, global director of sales initiatives at AWS. He is an innovation and training enthusiast. He is also Brazilian, so he brings a perspective that really knows the particularities of Latin America.

“We have a large labor market in the region. We have a lack of qualified professionals. That is why we are investing so much in social retraining and in making sure we have organizations educating and hiring,” he explains. From your reading, the problem with the labor market is that today it lacks technical profiles. They estimate that at least two million more professionals are needed who can apply AI solutions.

“From our experiences, we see that organizations in Latin America are more open to experimentation than any other region. And that, in the era of generative AI, where experimentation and adjustment are part of the things to do, makes us unique,” he says optimistically.

Another of his readings is that AI forces us to constantly readapt and learn new skills so as not to fall by the wayside. “It’s not about losing jobs. It’s really about adjusting to new ones. And that’s the key. Everyone who asks me, ‘Fabio, who’s going to lose their job or how many jobs are going to be cut?’ We keep hearing that, but what about the ones being created? There are roles right now that didn’t exist a couple of years ago: data analyst, data scientist, generative AI (GenAI) developer. Every time someone asks me What do I imagine my children will work on, the answer has always been ‘I don’t know, because it hasn’t been created yet’because things are changing at such a fast pace that it’s scary,” he risks.

If AI can automate tasks that were previously required by several professionals, the paradigm of this new era would be for these people to show that they can provide added value. “If you ask a person to do something, and a tool can do it, Are you replaceable yes or no? If you can add value to what you are doing, the answer will be no. If the answer is yes, well, you’re in a difficult situation,” he challenges.

But the great added value that real humans still offer are their soft skills, the ability to lead teams. “AI, no matter how advanced it is, still does not have mastery, cognitive or social reasoning. So they are not going to replace us in the short term. The human will always be in the workflow (Human in the loop) in some way,” he predicts.

Vogels’ closure goes in the same direction. He speaks to an audience of more than 8,000 people, populated largely by developers and programmers, an area that has always been key and in high demand but that has now also been left in the middle of turbulence due to the massification of AIs that can write code and execute it.

His prediction points to a new era similar to the European Renaissance, but of developers, where curiosity and exploration led to new ideas. It is accompanied by giant images of Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo Galilei, among others. “Lorenzo de Medici was probably the first version of what we know today as a venture capitalist (venture capitalist), philanthropist or whatever you want to call it,” he says.

The developer of the future, Vogels lists, You must be curious, think in systems, communicate efficiently with others, be the owner of what you create and know various areas.. “Is agentic AI going to take your job? Well, probably. Now, will it make you obsolete? Not if you evolve,” he says. And remember again: “The work is yours, not the tool’s.”