AI will trigger global labour shortage not mass redundancies, claims Jeff Bezos

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has pushed back against fears that AI will cause widespread unemployment, claiming the technology will unlock a wave of economic opportunity and trigger a global labour shortage.

Speaking at Europe’s largest tech exposition, VivaTech in Paris, the billionaire entrepreneur dismissed warnings from political and labour leaders who fear a wave of automation-driven redundancies.

Bezos argued that human potential is currently limited by technical bottlenecks rather than a lack of ambition. By removing these barriers, he stated, AI will dramatically increase the global demand for human labour.

In particular, Bezos highlighted his new artificial intelligence venture, Prometheus. The company focuses specifically on applying AI to accelerate physical manufacturing, creating roles centred around advanced industrial design, system optimisation, and human-machine collaboration.

This optimistic outlook stands in contrast to recent warnings from figures including former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, now an adviser to Microsoft and Anthropic, who noted that AI is already squeezing entry-level job prospects for young people.

The UK’s Trades Union Congress has also cautioned that unchecked automation risks repeating the economic damage of 20th-century deindustrialisation.

Lunar base expansion

Beyond artificial intelligence, Bezos used the Paris stage to outline his long-term infrastructure plans for space exploration, framing the sector as “supply constrained, not demand constrained.”

He announced an absolute commitment to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon, using localised lunar resources rather than relying entirely on supplies shipped from Earth. “We’re going to the Moon to stay, not just to visit,” Bezos told the audience.

He explained that technologies such as electrolysis, the process of using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, will eventually allow future missions to harvest lunar ice, creating sustainable refuelling stations for deep-space rockets.

The discussion also addressed recent setbacks at Bezos’s spaceflight company, Blue Origin, following the ground-test explosion of its uncrewed New Glenn rocket in Florida last month. Describing the incident as a “gut punch,” Bezos noted that the team “got really lucky” as critical fuel and propellant infrastructure survived intact.

Appearing alongside Bezos, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp confirmed that reconstruction at Cape Canaveral is actively underway, with flight launches expected to resume before the end of the year.