Amazon launches AI hiring tool

Amazon on April 28 introduced Amazon Connect Talent, a new artificial-intelligence hiring product built to speed up large seasonal recruiting. (channelnewsasia.com) (aboutamazon.com) The software is aimed at employers that need to recruit at scale, including holiday-season retailers that hire in huge bursts. Amazon said the product can find, screen and recruit workers while replacing much of the face-to-face interview process. (channelnewsasia.com) (aboutamazon.com) Amazon said Connect Talent can conduct artificial-intelligence-led interviews around the clock and prepare notes for recruiters without human intervention. Colleen Aubrey, Amazon Web Services senior vice president of applied AI solutions, told Reuters candidates will be told when artificial intelligence is screening them. (channelnewsasia.com) The hiring tool was part of a broader reset for Amazon Connect, which Amazon expanded from one customer-service product into four “agentic” artificial-intelligence offerings. The new lineup includes Connect Decisions for supply chains, Connect Talent for hiring, Connect Customer for customer experience, and Connect Health for health care. (aboutamazon.com) (aws.amazon.com) “Agentic” software is Amazon’s term for systems that can take steps on their own inside a workflow instead of only answering prompts. Amazon paired that pitch with a design idea it calls “humorphism,” which Aubrey described as software that adapts to how people work rather than forcing people to adapt to software. (channelnewsasia.com) Amazon is selling the hiring product with its own scale as proof point. The company said it hired 250,000 seasonal employees for the 2025 peak season alone, alongside managing more than 400 million stock-keeping units and millions of daily customer interactions. (aboutamazon.com) The launch also lands one day before Amazon reports first-quarter results on April 29. Analysts cited by GeekWire expect about $177 billion in revenue, while Wall Street is watching whether Amazon Web Services can keep accelerating as Amazon spends heavily on artificial-intelligence infrastructure. (geekwire.com) (finance.yahoo.com) That spending plan is unusually large even by big-tech standards. Yahoo Finance reported Amazon is expected to account for about $200 billion of the $650 billion in 2026 capital spending projected across the major artificial-intelligence cloud companies, while Amazon’s remaining performance obligations stood at $244 billion in the fourth quarter. (finance.yahoo.com) Amazon has already been using artificial intelligence inside its own hiring process. In January, the company said artificial-intelligence interview transcription made conversations more engaging for 83% of candidates, and candidates surfaced by its matching tools were 24% more likely to get a positive result after an initial interview loop. (aboutamazon.com) The immediate test is whether Connect Talent becomes a real business line instead of another expensive demo. Amazon is asking investors to believe the same artificial-intelligence systems behind its cloud backlog can also sell hiring, supply-chain, customer-service and health-care software to other companies. (geekwire.com) (aboutamazon.com)