Amazon VP says his division is hiring and promoting based on employees’ AI usage

• Amazon VP of product Jamie Siminoff told Business Insider that he is promoting employees based on their AI use.
• Siminoff founded Ring, which he later sold to Amazon, and now oversees the company’s division of home security products.
• Siminoff also said that he wanted to hire people who used AI for everyday tasks.

Want to get ahead in Amazon’s home security unit? You’d better be using AI.

In July, Business Insider viewed an email from Jamie Siminoff, Amazon’s VP of product who runs the home security division. In it, Siminoff said that all promotion applications would require employees to list how they were using AI.

Siminoff doubled down on that position in an interview with Business Insider last week while promoting his book “Ding Dong.”

“I would go even deeper than that,” Siminoff said. “We’re going to promote based on AI. We’re going to promote based on how you’re integrating AI into your job.”

Siminoff said that he wants to incentivize his team to use the technology more.

“The promotion process is the only real incentive that I can give to a team, because that’s how they’re going to get paid,” he said. “If you are creating more leverage for the company than everyone else, then yeah, that should be how you get promoted.”

Siminoff spoke with Business Insider before Amazon cut 14,000 jobs on Tuesday. On a recent earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs were “not really financially driven,” nor were they “really AI-driven, not right now at least,” but they were rather about “culture.”

Siminoff declined to provide an additional comment after the layoffs.

At the time of Business Insider’s July reporting on Jassy’s memo, an Amazon representative said that the change to promotional applications did not apply to the whole company, only to those in the RBKS division — Ring, Blink, Key, and Sidewalk.

Siminoff cofounded Ring, the video doorbell and home security company. He pitched the “Shark Tank” investors in 2013 but walked away without a deal. Five years later, the company was acquired by Amazon for over $1 billion.

After leaving Amazon in 2023, Siminoff returned in his new role as VP of product in April 2025. He refocused Ring on crime-fighting and home security, and added more AI features to the product lineup.

In his interview with Business Insider, Siminoff also said that he was asking about AI usage during hiring interviews: “AI in, AI out. It is like a broken record.”

Asked what an AI-related interview question might sound like, Siminoff said it differed between roles. For example, an engineer might be asked which tools they know how to use, he said.

“I think it’s the mentality of: are you leaning into AI first?” Siminoff said. “We don’t want someone who’s like, ‘Oh, AI, I know how to use that, I’ll use it if you tell me to.'”

The ideal candidate already uses tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to solve daily problems, he added.

“You’re thinking that way natively,” Siminoff said. “That’s the people I want now.”