AI is not a replacement for human workers; AI is a force multiplier for human productivity. That distinction matters more than ever, especially for executives making long-term bets about talent and culture.
And I’m not alone in saying this. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, put it bluntly in a recent Fortune interview:
“You’ve gotta think longer term about the health of a company… just saying ‘OK great, we’re never going to hire junior people anymore,’ that’s just a nonstarter for anyone who’s trying to build a long-term company.” -AWS CEO, Matt Garman, talking with a journalist
In an interesting wrinkle: Matt Garman joined Amazon 20 years ago as an intern, reporting to then-marketing-executive Andy Jassy—now Amazon’s CEO.
This framing aligns closely with how we think about AI at Metal Toad: AI is a mech suit. It requires a human pilot to operate effectively. AI amplifies human capabilities, it does not replaces them.
At an executive round table at re:Invent, Matt Yanchyshyn, VP, AWS Marketplace & Partner Services described the humans overseeing AI agents as "conductors", like people who guide a symphony. I like this description and I think it's a worthwhile metaphor.
Microsoft's AI Debacle
History is already showing what happens when companies confuse replacement with acceleration. The poster child is Microsoft. When their CEO, Satya Nadella, shared that roughly 20–30% of Microsoft’s code was being written by AI Wall Street cheered the efficiency, and Microsoft stock surged.
Then reality intervened:
• core UX components broke
• the Start Menu stopped working
• the Taskbar crashed
When you remove humans from the loop, you don’t get leverage—you get fragility.
A widening gap
If this is true, why are executives like Satya Nadella, and Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, making foolhardy declarations like saying Salesforce won't be 'hiring any more software engineers... amid significant productivity boosts from AI"?
There is a widening AI adoption gap inside companies. One recent analysis notes that “over 70–80% of executives use AI, compared to under 30% of individual contributors,” creating a divide where leadership uses AI for strategy and planning, while the people closest to execution are seeing shortfalls in the technology. People charged with execution lack trust, and training when it comes to AI, but it's being forced on them anyway.
That imbalance is the real risk. Not AI itself—but executives over-indexing on AI while under-investing in the humans who then have to figure out how to put AI into action. The companies that win won’t be the ones that replace people with AI. They’ll be the ones that pair talent pipelines, junior mentorship, and human judgment with powerful AI tools—and let each make the other better.