Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a personal stake in how artificial intelligence reshapes the lives of young people. As the head of the $2.6 trillion tech giant, he is steering the company through the AI revolution—but at home, his two Gen Z children, ages 25 and 22, are confronting the same technological upheaval that is transforming education and the workplacen
His message to his own kids, and to young people everywhere, is twofold: don't avoid AI, but don't allow it to replace the critical thinking and judgment that have long been essential to success. Because Jassy leads a company going through that same transformation, his advice works both as parental guidance and as a signal of the skills Amazon's own leadership considers essential.

"The advice I would give somebody young and I gave my kids was you can't run away from it and you can't wish it away," Jassy said on The a16z Show, a podcast from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, last week. "It's going to be incredibly impactful in your life in every experience that you try and use in your work, and it will allow you to invent in ways that just weren't possible for us before."

Jassy, 58, took over as Amazon's chief executive from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021. He earned a salary of $365,000 last year and has led the company to the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500, Fortune's annual ranking of the largest U.S. companies by revenue.

And he emphasized that embracing AI is not just for aspiring tech workers. Young people from all backgrounds, he said, should learn how to use the technology and experiment with what it can do.

"You need to learn about it, educate yourself, use it a lot. Try doing things outside your comfort zone," Jassy added. "Neither of my kids was a developer, but they've used AI to build applications. Use it as a focal point of how you operate day to day and how you use tools at work."

AI can eliminate grunt work—but Jassy warns AI-generated writing is easy to spot

A Harvard Business School alumnus, Jassy offered his own business school experience as an example of how AI can eliminate tedious preliminary work.

"Oftentimes there were a bunch of people who just didn't do the work—they just didn't do the reading or the research or the note-taking, and all that kind of goes away with AI," Jassy said. "AI is going to be able to get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly."

While AI can help people get up to speed faster, Jassy warned against leaning too heavily on the technology. AI-generated writing, in particular, can be easy to spot as "not quite right," he said, because the pieces don't quite fit together.

"I still think you're going to need human judgment and ingenuity and invention and experimentation and thinking about how all the pieces come together to end up building amazing experiences and businesses," Jassy said. "I think you want to use the tools, and they're going to be huge aids, but I still think critical reasoning and thinking is going to be very important in everything we do."

Amazon declined Fortune's request for comment.

Critical thinking is a top skill business leaders are looking for

Jassy is not alone in urging young people to strike a balance—embracing the technology without letting it replace their ability to think independently.

Billionaire Shark Tank star and KIND bar founder Daniel Lubetzky has said that critical thinking will be increasingly sought out across workplaces.

"Being a critical thinker is in high demand, and they're going to become greater demand. AI is real, but it doesn't have the creativity that humans have," Lubetzky told Fortune last year. "If, as young people, you lean into your curiosity, in your critical thinking and in your creativity, you will win."

To do so, he said Gen Z should focus on studying history and philosophy—and question any and all assumptions.

"Always ask why, and then go one level below double click, triple click, to the sources. Why? Why? Why? Why?" he said. "If you do that, you're going to develop a mind that's going to be able to beat anybody else and be more valuable in the workplace."

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, who leads the cloud computing division of the company Jassy oversees, has also emphasized the importance of developing skills that will help young workers adapt as AI changes the nature of their jobs.

"You're going to want to be creative," Garman said to CNBC last year. "You're going to want to be [good at] critical thinking. And you're going to want to be flexible."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.