Amazon's HR chief went back to code after 25 years

For twenty-five years she did not write code. Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, now has more than 100,000 lines behind her, written with AI tools such as Kiro, Amazon Quick and Aza. She started out as an engineer before moving into HR: the code was still around, she says, she just was not the one writing it anymore.

The story would be a corporate anecdote if not for the context. Over the past year Amazon cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs — 14,000 in October 2025 and another 16,000 in January 2026. Against that backdrop the company ran an internal contest called Everyone Can Build, open to staff in any role rather than engineers only. More than 1,500 employees entered within a few weeks. PPC Land unpacked the story, noting that Amazon also announced Future Ready 2030, a $2.5 billion programme meant to prepare 50 million people worldwide for AI-era work, including 500,000 of its own employees.

What matters here:

• $1 billion of that goes into Career Choice, a programme more than 300,000 people have already been through;
• the contest revealed demand from below: non-technical staff build their own tools when given the environment;
• meanwhile Amazon's advertising business keeps growing — $19.8 billion in Q2 2026, up 26% year over year.

For marketing teams the takeaway is awkward but simple. The barrier to automation has dropped to the point where a reporting export script, a SERP parser or a crawl of a thousand URLs is an evening's work rather than a two-week ticket for a developer. The advantage no longer belongs to people who can write code — it belongs to people who stopped waiting for someone else to write it. As Galetti puts it: "You don't need perfection to start. You just need to dive in."