Good morning. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a message to employees Tuesday said that the company expects to reduce its total workforce in the next few years as efficiency gains from its investments in generative AI and agents kick in.

“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce,” Jassy said.

The company is using generative AI across internal operations, he said, from its fulfillment network to customer service to building product pages. 

Jassy said he expects AI agents will take care of rote work to speed up the rate of innovation. “Agents will allow us to start almost everything from a more advanced starting point,” he said.

His note was among the starkest commentaries to date from a major company on AI’s likely impact on employment, say the WSJ's Sebastian Herrera and Katherine Hamilton.

There have been more.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in May told the WSJ's Belle Lin that the company has used AI agents to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers. Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan has said he believes the banking industry will employ fewer people over time because of AI.

But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game for jobs between humans and AI (at least not yet). Demand for AI skills is soaring (more below). Read the story.

Also...a note to readers: The Morning Download won't be published Thursday in observance of Juneteenth in the U.S. We will be back Friday.

Pope Leo XIV is making the potential threat of AI to humanity a signature issue of his pontificate, challenging a tech sector that has spent years trying to cultivate the Vatican as an ally. WSJ reports.

Over the past decade, many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives have flown to Rome to shape how the world’s largest Christian denomination thinks and speaks about their innovations.

But the new pontiff, a math graduate, comes to the role with a tech savvy of his own, choosing his papal name because of the tech revolution. He told the College of Cardinals that his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

This week, the Vatican is hosting executives from Google, Meta, IBM, Anthropic, Cohere and Palantir in its grand Apostolic Palace, as part of a two-day international conference in Rome on AI, ethics and corporate governance. Read the story.

Salesforce said Tuesday that prices for its products will increase 6% in August. It will be the first price raise by the company since 2023, Bloomberg reports.

Oracle’s cloud division is working to add access to xAI’s Grok 3 model to its business customers, Reuters reports.

Waymo, Google’s robo-taxi service, is expanding its service in California, Verge reports, pushing beyond the city limits of San Francisco into the Peninsula, opening its Silicon Valley service to customers in Palo Alto and Mountain View, and adding to its Los Angeles footprint with Silver Lake and Playa del Rey, among other areas.

President Trump will sign an executive order sparing TikTok from enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, WSJ reports. It is the third extension since Trump took office in January.

Discussions about AI's integration into the workplace often spark predictions of significant workforce reductions in the name of tech-enabled efficiency.

However, this isn't always the case. A Deloitte Tech Exec Survey, released Tuesday, found that 69% of U.S.-based technology leaders surveyed planned to increase their tech function's headcount in response to generative AI. 

"The skills that are required to do generative AI, agentic AI, don't exist in organizations," said Anjali Shaikh, CIO and CDAO Programs U.S. leader at Deloitte. She added that companies are actively recruiting for a wide range of roles, including data scientists and ML engineers.

Shaikh noted that specialized technical skills alone won't define tech hiring in the GenAI era. "To be effective with AI skills or Gen AI skills, you don't need to be a hardcore tech programmer, like maybe 10 years ago," she explained. "You're going to start seeing that shift to being more of that combination of soft skills and technical skills." Read the report.

Deloitte is a sponsor of CIO Journal.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that his country won’t surrender and warned that any U.S. military intervention would bring irreparable consequences. (WSJ)

New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was detained by authorities at immigration court while escorting a person who had attended a hearing out of the building. (WSJ)

Investigators believe Air India Flight 171 had an emergency-power generator operating when it crashed last week, raising questions about whether the plane’s engines functioned properly during takeoff. (WSJ)

Leaders from some of America’s biggest trading partners traveled to the Group of Seven industrial nations summit in Canada this week hoping for deals with President Trump. They left empty-handed. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.