Amazon wants robots to interview seasonal workers now. The company launched Connect Talent, software that treats AI agents like background processes and generates recruiter notes with zero human involvement. AWS senior vice president Colleen Aubrey confirmed candidates will know AI is screening them, though she admitted the voice interaction still needs work. "The experience continues to get better and better each iteration we go through," she told Reuters. "There's some art around making that voice interaction natural and human."
The target use case is clear. Amazon hired roughly 250,000 seasonal workers last holiday season. That's a mountain of interviews. For high-volume, low-stakes hiring, some developers see the logic. But interviewing goes both ways. Candidates evaluate companies too, and an AI interviewer tells you something about how that company values its people.
Then there's the history. Amazon killed an internal AI recruiting tool in 2018 after it was found to discriminate against women. The system, trained on a decade of resumes mostly from men, penalized candidates from women's colleges and downgraded resumes mentioning "women's." Engineers tried fixing it but abandoned the project. Amazon says it has ethical guidelines and bias testing in place now, similar to how automated root cause analysis agents work.
The company also announced Connect Decisions for supply chain planning and debuted "humorphism," its design philosophy for making AI feel more human. This comes alongside roughly 30,000 corporate job cuts since October, some tied directly to AI efficiencies. The irony isn't subtle.