Amazon Cuts 14,000 Corporate Jobs in Major AI-Driven Restructuring

Amazon to cut 14,000 corporate jobs | TechCrunch

Amazon said on Tuesday that it plans to reduce its corporate workforce by 14,000 jobs as it seeks to reduce bureaucracy, remove layers and invest more in its AI strategy. This marks the e-commerce giant's second-largest job cuts since it slashed 22,000 jobs in 2022. Amazon had nearly 1.2 million employees as of October 31, 2024, of which more than 360,000 were in its corporate division, in administrative, sales and executive roles. In a memo shared with employees, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, wrote that the move is aimed at making the company "even stronger" by shifting resources to invest in its "biggest bets." Galetti acknowledged that the decision would be questioned in light of the company's good performance, but argued that the layoffs are necessary because the "world is changing quickly." "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convicted [sic] that we need to be organized more leanly [sic], with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she wrote. The layoffs come at a time when Amazon is investing heavily in tech infrastructure to build more compute capacity for offering AI services. In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to staff that the company would need fewer employees as it continues to roll out more AI agents. "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." That focus is clearly visible if you consider the company's expenditure on tech infrastructure. Amazon said it had spent $55.6 billion in the first half of its current financial year primarily on tech infrastructure to support the growth of its cloud services business, Amazon Web Services, according to its quarterly report. The company's revenue increased 13% to $167.7 billion in the second quarter compared to a year earlier. AWS accounted for 18% of total net sales. Reuters reported on Monday that the company was planning to slash up to 30,000 jobs across human resources, devices and services, operations, and other departments. The company has made smaller job cuts across different divisions. In January, Amazon reduced a small number of positions in its Communications and Sustainability departments. Amazon said it is offering most affected employees 90 days to look for a new role internally, and its recruiters would prioritize internal candidates for new roles within the company. It will also offer severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more to those who can't move internally. Galetti wrote that in 2026, the company would continue to remove layers and "realize efficiency gains" while hiring in key areas.

Amazon Cuts 14,000 Jobs Amid AI Push

Alex Valdes from Bellevue, Washington has been pumping content into the Internet river for quite a while, including stints at MSNBC.com, MSN, Bing, MoneyTalksNews, Tipico and more. He admits to being somewhat fascinated by the Cambridge coffee webcam back in the Roaring '90s. Just one week after a report came out that Amazon wanted to replace 75% of its workforce with robots, the online retail giant has announced that it is laying off 14,000 employees to reduce "bureaucracy" and invest in "our biggest bets" -- namely, artificial intelligence. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)," said Beth Galetti, SVP of People Experience and Technology, in a blog post on Tuesday. "We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. Citing information from Amazon workers, Reuters said departments most affected would be devices, advertising, Prime Video, HR and Amazon's cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services. Twitch has also reportedly been affected. Reuters also reported that there would be more job cuts in future, bringing the total job losses to 30,000. The layoffs are reportedly the largest in Amazon history, and come months after CEO Andy Jassy outlined his vision for how the company would rapidly ramp up its development of generative AI and AI agents. The cuts are the latest in a wave of layoffs this year as tech giants including Microsoft, Accenture, Salesforce and India's TCS have reduced their workforces by thousands in what has become a frenzied push to invest in AI. In a report issued earlier in October, it was projected that the global AI infrastructure market -- driven mostly by the need to construct massive data centers -- would grow from $26.18 billion in 2024 to $221.40 billion by 2034, an annual growth rate of nearly 24%. Amazon is the third-largest employer in the US, but is also pushing further into robot workers. The e-commerce giant already has more than 1 million robots operating in its delivery and fulfillment network -- two-thirds of the company's human workforce. Amazon reportedly wants to automate 75% of its operations. A CNBC report said Amazon could save $4 billion per year by 2027 if it automates as much as it plans to in its warehouses. The key to its automation plans is quick and huge investment in AI. In his blog post on June 17, Jassy said, "Today, we have over 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but at our scale, that's a small fraction of what we will ultimately build. We're going to lean in further in the coming months." Jassy said AI agents will be able to do countless tasks, will speed up innovation and will help Amazon stay "customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy."

Amazon cuts 14,000 jobs, blames AI

Amazon is planning to axe around 14,000 corporate jobs. The mass layoffs were expected as part of the company's cost-cutting drive, but are smaller than the 30,000 job losses previous reports had indicated. Beth Galetti, a senior executive at the e-commerce giant, broke the news to employees in a message on Tuesday. "The reductions we're sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs," Galetti said. Galetti did not give an indication of what roles are being cut or where they are located. Most employees will have 90 days to look for a new job internally, she said. "Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well," Galetti wrote. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly." Galetti said Amazon expects "to continue hiring in key strategic areas" in 2026, but will also keep searching for areas to "realize efficiency gains," suggesting more job cuts may be on the horizon. Amazon's last major round of job cuts was at the end of 2022 and into 2023, when 27,000 workers were laid off. Galetti's memo referenced a message from CEO Andy Jassy sent to employees in June. In it, the executive evangelizes generative AI as both the source of Amazon's sought efficiency gains -- read job cuts -- and its strategic direction for products and services. The company has made it clear it hopes to tap automation, robotics, and AI as means of slashing labor costs and ultimately replacing thousands more human workers.

Amazon Confirms 14,000 Corporate Layoffs So It Can Move Faster on AI

(Credit: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images) Amazon today confirmed plans to lay off 14,000 people in corporate roles amid a continued push on AI, though more cuts could be in store for 2026. The company is "reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets," Beth Galetti, head of HR at Amazon, wrote in a company-wide email that it also published online. Galetti's memo comes after Reuters reported yesterday that Amazon planned to cut "as many as 30,000 corporate jobs." She didn't address that number, but said Amazon expects to find "additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains" next year. Reuters reports the cuts will primarily affect those in HR, devices, services, and operations. Employees will hear today if they are affected. Amazon will offer "most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally." Those who cannot find a new role at Amazon will receive "transition support, including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more," Galetti says. Some are already posting about being laid off on social media. "After years of pouring my heart into this company and its people, it's surreal to say that this chapter is now closed," a senior recruiter with Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios wrote on LinkedIn. Usually this type of corporate cut would occur when a company is doing poorly, but Amazon had $18 billion in profit in the latest quarter, The New York Times reports. It's also increased spending on AI data centers. Amazon acknowledged this in its employee memo, citing its ambitions to move even faster in AI. "Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well," Galetti wrote. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)." Amazon plans to "operate like the world's largest startup," she added, a phrase CEO Andy Jassy first used in a September 2024 memo to employees in which he also announced a "bureaucracy mailbox," where employees could forward examples of "where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that's crept in and we can root out." Amazon also laid off approximately 27,000 people a few years ago. As of July, it had 1.55 million employees. Last week, Meta cut 600 roles within its AI division, also citing the need to move faster, so even those who work in AI might not be safe in today's unpredictable tech climate. Last week, The New York Times reported that Amazon would ramp up the use of automation in its warehouses in the coming years, which would allow it to hire about 600,000 fewer human employees. Amazon pushed back on that characterization, however, and pointed to the 250,000 seasonal jobs it will once again add for the holiday rush.

AI layoffs to backfire: half quietly rehired at lower pay

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles -- often "offshore or at lower salary." According to Forrester's "Predictions 2026: The Future Of Work" analysis, half of AI-attributed layoffs are likely to be reversed. "Many companies claim to be cutting jobs due to AI. Some of these efforts yield spectacular failures... Other times, AI isn't actually replacing human workers at all. Too often, the C-suite lays workers off for the future promise of AI," says the report. Forrester's analysis found that using AI for financially driven layoffs can backfire: 55 percent of employers regret laying off workers because of AI. More people in charge of AI investment expect it to increase headcount (57 percent) than to decrease it (15 percent) over the next year. "We predict that much of this work will be given to lower-wage human workers, offshore or at lower salary," the report adds. The impact may be most pronounced in HR, where teams are adopting a flood of AI tools. Staffing in the HR function could be cut by half, even as it's expected to deliver the same level of service with the help of AI-driven talent and workforce planning systems. "Many will turn to vendors' AI-washed product offerings to give them at least the appearance of AI readiness, with only a few armed with the [ability] to discern legit tech from vaporware." In June, rival research firm Gartner predicted that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects would be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls. In the field of CRM, a benchmark developed by academics showed that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality. The team led by Kung-Hsiang Huang, a Salesforce AI researcher, showed that using a new benchmark relying on synthetic data, LLM agents achieve around a 58 percent success rate on tasks that can be completed in a single step without needing follow-up actions or more information. Some organizations, including Klarna and Duolingo have subsequently revisted their aggressive AI strategy. Nonetheless, the tech industry has seen a steady march of job losses as its leadership brags about the dogfooding of AI products. In September, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said the company had slashed 4,000 customer support roles through the application of AI agents. The company said it no longer needed to backfill support engineer roles and was redeploying staff elsewhere in the business. Earlier this week, Amazon announced 14,000 corporate job cuts, citing the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence for changing how the company operates. ®

Corporate job losses mount amid tightening economy and AI growth

Corporate workers are fighting for a shrinking pool of jobs as mass lay-offs and a hiring slowdown stoke fears of a "white-collar recession", amid mounting pressure from tariffs, slowing economic growth and artificial intelligence. In the past week, companies including Amazon, Paramount, United Parcel Service and Target have all announced they will slash a combined 31,800 office-based roles, with some directly citing plans to use AI to reduce their labour force. Others cited rising costs from President Donald Trump's tariffs regime and falling sales as consumers curtail their spending. The recent cuts mark the end of nearly six years of high job security for high-earning human resources specialists, marketers, managers, software developers and other knowledge workers whose ranks have expanded rapidly since the start of Covid-19 pandemic. These workers' spending has upheld the US economy in recent months as lower-income households sharply pulled back because of inflation. The US economy has grown unevenly throughout 2025, with GDP increasing at an annualised rate of 3.8 per cent in the second quarter and a 0.6 per cent contraction in the first. "It's not great that consumer spending is really hinging on a smaller class of people," said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at jobs site Indeed. "But if they go away because there's a lot of investment in AI, that can definitely worsen the situation for everyone. It's so much more precarious." US companies announced almost 1mn job cuts in the year to September, the most since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, according to figures from recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Hiring plans announced in the same period were the lowest since 2009. When Amazon on Tuesday outlined plans to cut 14,000 jobs across its corporate workforce, Beth Galetti, a senior executive, said the company needed to be "organised more leanly" to capitalise on opportunities from AI. Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods behemoth, cited a similar rationale when it announced plans in July to cut 15 per cent of its "non-manufacturing" workforce by 2027. Jon Moeller, chief executive, said the company would use "digitisation and automation" to make work "more fulfilling and more efficient". The Federal Reserve is watching these lay-off announcements "very closely", chair Jay Powell said on Wednesday, adding Trump's immigration crackdown and the rise of AI "could have implications for job creation". Nestlé and children's clothier Carter's both said hefty tariff bills are weighing on their bottom lines as they slashed their corporate workforces earlier this month. Carter's chief financial officer Richard Westenberger said the retailer would cut 15 per cent of its corporate staff as a part of a larger plan to reduce costs to offset the "considerable impact [tariffs] have begun to have on our business". Puma on Thursday said it would cut 900 corporate roles -- one in eight of its office staff -- as it struggles with lower sales. These recent cuts come amid a broader slowdown in white-collar recruitment, as companies also increasingly shrink their workforces by attrition. "Lay-offs get a lot of the attention, but weak hiring has been much more important in explaining the cooling that we've seen in the labour market," said Guy Berger, an economist-in-residence at human resources consultancy Guild. The number of private sector employees working in information and professional and business services -- sectors composed largely of white-collar workers -- declined between January and September, even as the US continued to add jobs, according to figures from payroll processor ADP. However, openings in blue-collar sectors such as construction and manufacturing have increased as Trump's hardline immigration crackdown restricts the supply of low-wage labour into the US. Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, said lay-offs at companies such as Amazon could be an early warning sign for white-collar workers elsewhere. "Those big technology companies are earlier adopters [of AI] so we are likely to see the impact there first," he said. Some companies have made this explicit. In a memo to staff in April, Shopify chief executive Tobi Lutke said employees would have to "demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI" before asking for additional headcount or resources. Earlier this year Microsoft announced it would be slashing jobs by the thousands despite its quarterly profits soaring almost 25 per cent. Even as business leaders claim AI is "redesigning" jobs rather than cutting them, Intel and BT in the UK are among others announcing dismissals this year explicitly linked to AI. Powell on Wednesday warned recent lay-offs had not shown up in official unemployment figures. Nevertheless, some economists and investors see these announcements as early signals of economic unease -- particularly as the US government shutdown has halted the publication of closely watched metrics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The labour department said in its most recent report, covering August, that the number of lay-offs was "little changed" throughout the year. "You've probably heard the phrase 'low hire, low fire,' but I think that makes it sound a little too chill, like we're in a new equilibrium, which isn't really the case," Shrivastava said. "We've had too much uncertainty. It's really a 'hold your breath and try not to pass out' labour market."

Amazon laying off about 14,000 corporate workers as it invests more in AI

In a blog post, the company wrote that the layoffs are being carried out to help make the company leaner and less bureaucratic, while it looks to invest in "our biggest bets" including generative artificial intelligence. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)," Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, wrote. "We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and businesses." The layoffs are expected to ultimately be the largest corporate job cuts in Amazon's history, CNBC previously reported. Reuters reported the cuts could affect as many as 30,000 employees, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Amazon cuts its workforce by 14,000 in further embrace of AI

Amazon has announced an approximately 14,000 person reduction in its corporate workforce. The news follows an earlier report from Reuters that up to 30,000 people could be let go. However, the exact number of layoffs is unclear, with the 14,000 figure being cushioned by planned hirings. Engadget has reached out to Amazon for exact layoff numbers, but Bloomberg reports that impacted jobs are within teams such as video games, logistics, payments and cloud-computing. The impetus for this reduction is, of course, AI. In the announcement, Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, states that Amazon is "performing well" but "that the world is changing quickly." Galetti continues: "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Amazon has executed a series of smaller scale layoffs regularly over the past few years. These layoffs have hit a range of departments, including Prime Video, Amazon Web Services and newly unionized warehouse workers.

Amazon confirms massive job losses in corporate division

Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, wrote in a note to staff, external that the move would make the company "even stronger" by shifting resources "to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs". She acknowledged that some would question the move given the company was performing well. At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn). But Ms Galetti said the cuts were needed because AI was "the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet" and was "enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before." "We're convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she added. The note, shared with Amazon employees earlier on Tuesday, said the company was "working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted" - including by helping those affected find new roles within Amazon. Those who cannot will receive "transition support" including severance pay, it said. The BBC has asked if it will affect employees in the UK. The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide. This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures, external that Amazon submitted to the US government last year. Like many technology firms, Amazon hired aggressively during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the surge in demand for online deliveries and digital services. Amazon boss Andy Jassy has since focused on reducing spending as the company invests heavily in AI tools to boost efficiency. Mr Jassy said in June that the increase in AI tools will likely lead to job cuts as machines take over routine tasks. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," he said then. The company has carried out several rounds of cuts to its corporate division in recent years. It laid off around 27,000 workers over several months in 2022, as rivals similarly looked to reverse hiring increases made during the pandemic. But analysts said its more subdued profit guidance for the forthcoming quarter had left some sceptical of the value of its enormous AI investments and whether they would pay off. Slower growth for its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), compared to rivals Microsoft and Google, also sparked concern among some investors. Amazon will report its latest quarterly results on Thursday for the period ending 30 September.

Amazon Braces for Major Cuts to Its White Collar Work Force

Amazon is bracing for major job cuts among its corporate employees starting on Tuesday, as it spends aggressively on artificial intelligence development, according to two people familiar with the cuts. Another round of corporate cuts is expected in January, after the holiday shopping season, the people said. One of the people said the company was looking to cut billions of dollars in its operating expenses, and gave the leaders of the groups facing cuts, including human resources, targets to trim 10 to 15 percent of their costs related to head count. More senior roles, like directors, are expected to be harder hit than in earlier rounds of layoffs, the people said. Reuters, which reported the layoffs earlier on Monday, said the cuts could total about 30,000 jobs, or almost 10 percent of the company's corporate ranks. Amazon declined to comment. The company had $18 billion in profit in the latest quarter, and has increased spending on data centers that develop leading artificial intelligence systems. Capital expenses, which include data centers, are expected to top $120 billion this year, up almost 50 percent from last year. In June, Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, told employees that efficiency gains from using A.I. will shrink the company's corporate work force over the next few years. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today," he wrote. While that might create new opportunities, he predicted that the overall corporate work force would be smaller as a result. Amazon has also looked to rein in the growth of its warehouse and other blue-collar workers, who make up most of its more than 1.5 million employees. The New York Times reported last week that the company had plans to use automation to avoid hiring more than 600,000 warehouse employees in a decade even as it expects to sell twice as many items over that period. Amazon last saw widespread layoffs almost three years ago, in a series of cuts over several months that trimmed 27,000 positions. The company's work force had ballooned during the early pandemic, topping 1.6 million. Though the business has since grown substantially, it had 1.5 million workers as of the end of June. Amazon's competitors have been turning to layoffs as well. Microsoft cut about 15,000 roles in the early summer. Target last week said it would trim roughly 1,800 corporate jobs, and Meta laid off 600 people.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

Layoffs are part of an efficiency drive, not a sign of struggle, says HR exec Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs, blaming the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence for changing how the company operates - and how many people it needs. In a public statement, Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, said the global layoffs were part of a plan to make the corporation "organized more leanly" and able to move faster as AI transforms every part of its business. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet," she wrote, claiming that automation and faster decision-making would allow Amazon to "innovate much faster than ever before." The cuts, announced on Tuesday, will affect staff across global corporate teams, including HR, devices, communications, and some AWS support roles, according to Reuters, which initially reported that Amazon planned to ax as many as 30,000 staffers. Managers began notifying affected employees this week following internal briefings on how to handle the process. Amazon said it is "working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted," offering most employees 90 days to find a new internal position and giving priority to internal candidates in recruitment. Those unable or unwilling to stay on will receive severance pay, outplacement support, health insurance coverage, and other benefits, according to Amazon. Amazon has over 350,000 corporate employees, according to a 2024 filing with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [PDF], meaning the reductions represent about 5 percent of its white-collar workforce. While the company insists its businesses are performing well, the move underlines how even the most profitable tech giants are reorganizing for the AI era. The reduction marks one of Amazon's largest culls since 2023, when it axed around 27,000 roles over the space of three months. In June, CEO Andy Jassy foreshadowed the move, telling employees that efficiency gains from artificial intelligence would eventually allow Amazon to operate with a smaller human workforce. Galetti's latest note puts that prediction into motion. The announcement also comes amid extraordinary investment elsewhere. Recent figures revealed that Amazon's annual capital expenditure for datacenters has now topped $100 billion - roughly comparable to Costa Rica's entire GDP and greater than that of Luxembourg or Lithuania. That spending spree highlights the shifting economics of Big Tech. While investments in AI infrastructure soar, headcount in corporate and administrative functions is dropping. Amazon has increasingly leaned on internal AI systems to streamline logistics, automate HR processes, and assist with code generation - technology that may now be replacing some of the humans who helped build it. The timing isn't ideal either. The layoffs arrive just a week after a major AWS outage in the US-East-1 region that took swathes of the internet offline. While the two events aren't directly related, the juxtaposition underscores the challenge of balancing efficiency drives with operational resilience. Amazon's keeping quiet on how much cash the cuts will save it, but the goal's plain enough: trim the fat, let the bots take over, and march toward the AI-powered future it's spending billions to build. For thousands of corporate staff, though, that leaner future will mean finding somewhere else to log in. ®

Amazon CEO Now Says AI Is Not Responsible for Recent Layoffs

Amazon just posted its third-quarter earnings and it turns out it was a phenomenal quarter for the e-commerce giant, despite recent layoffs. The company giant raked in $180.2 billion in sales in the three months ending Sept. 30, up 13% from the same period last year. Its cloud business, AWS, reported its largest year-over-year growth since 2022, climbing 20% to $33 billion. The company's stock even popped 13% in after-hours trading following the report. So why, with the company performing so well, did Amazon just slash 14,000 corporate jobs and hinted that more cuts could be on the way? Fortunately for us, CEO Andy Jassy was asked to comment on the layoffs during the company's earnings call Thursday evening. However, he was quick to downplay any connection to AI. "What I would tell you is, you know, the announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI driven, not right now at least," Jassy told investors. "It's culture." He went on to try to make the case that the company's rapid growth over the last several years added more people, layers, and complexity to its operations. This quick growth, in turn, slowed decision-making and weakened ownership for workers at the frontlines. Jassy said Amazon is now committed to operating like the world's largest startup in order to move more quickly during what he called the major "technology transformation happening right now." The memo sent to laid-off employees earlier this week hit a lot of the same points Jassy made. But it also directly named the big tech shift, AI, that he had been hinting at, even as he claimed it wasn't driving this round of layoffs. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," wrote Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, in the memo. Still, these job cuts also come as Amazon, and the rest of Silicon Valley, is seemingly betting it all on AI. Jassy said on Thursday that the company's AI and cloud infrastructure added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power capacity in the past 12 months and is expected to add another gigawatt this fourth quarter. And future cuts may not be limited to corporate workers. The New York Times reported last week that Amazon's automation team expects that by 2027, the company could avoid hiring more than 160,000 U.S. workers it would normally need. Overall, Amazon's robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of the company's operations, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

Amazon confirms 14,000 corporate job cuts, says push for 'efficiency gains' will continue into 2026

Amazon confirmed Tuesday that it is cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence. In a message to employees, posted on the company's website, Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti signaled that additional cutbacks are expected to take place into 2026, while indicating that the company will also continue to hire in key strategic areas. Reuters reported Monday that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still a possibility as the cutbacks continue into next year. At that scale, the overall number of job cuts could eventually be the largest in Amazon's history, exceeding the 27,000 positions that the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," wrote Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology. Amazon's leadership team believes the company needs "to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she explained. Galetti wrote that the company is "shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs" -- indicating that layoff decisions are being made based whether different teams and roles align with the company's direction. Amazon's corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. At that scale, the initial reduction of 14,000 represents about 4% of Amazon's corporate workforce. However, the number is a much smaller fraction of its overall workforce of 1.55 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses. Cuts are expected across multiple regions and countries, but they are likely to hit especially hard in the Seattle region, home to the company's first headquarters and its largest corporate workforce. The tech hub has already felt the impact of major layoffs by Microsoft and others in recent months. The cuts come two days before Amazon's third quarter earnings report. Amazon and other cloud giants have been pouring billions into capital expenses to boost AI capacity. Cutting jobs is one way of showing operating-expense discipline to Wall Street. In a memo to employees in June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he expected Amazon's total corporate workforce to get smaller over time as a result of efficiency gains from AI. Jassy took over as Amazon CEO from founder Jeff Bezos in mid-2021. In recent years he has been pushing to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company, saying he wants Amazon to operate like the "world's largest startup." Bloomberg News reported this week that Jassy has told colleagues that parts of the company remain "unwieldy" despite the 2023 layoffs and other efforts to streamline operations. As part of its report, Reuters cited sources saying the magnitude of the cuts is also a result of Amazon's strict return-to-office policy failing to cause enough employees to quit voluntarily. Amazon brought workers back five days a week earlier this year. Impacted teams and people will be notified of the layoffs today, Galetti wrote. Amazon is offering most impacted employees 90 days to find a new role internally, though the timing may vary based on local laws, according to the message. Those who do not find a new position at Amazon or choose to leave will be offered severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and other forms of support.

The nation's largest employers are putting their workers on notice

Amazon said on Tuesday that it will reduce its corporate workforce by as many as 14,000 roles. (Isabel Infantes/Reuters) Amazon and Walmart, the nation's two largest private employers, swelled with hundreds of thousands of new workers in recent years as they battled for larger slices of consumer pocketbooks. Amazon said in 2021 that its workforce had grown to more than 1.6 million people and boasted of being "the largest job-creator in the U.S." Walmart said last year that plans for 150 new stores would create new jobs across the United States. Now the retail giants are changing tack, laying off workers or keeping headcount flat as they pledge to become leaner businesses where artificial intelligence does more of the work. Amazon said this week it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs and saw its stock jump after reporting that sales grew 13 percent in the most recent quarter compared to last year, to $180 billion. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Walmart CEO Doug McMillon warned at a company event in September that AI is set "to change literally every job" and that his workers would have to adapt. Walmart expects to keep its 2.1 million-strong workforce steady for the next three years as it uses AI to evolve employees' roles, company spokesperson Jimmy Carter said. The companies are leading examples of a mindset shift across corporate America, with chief executives presenting freezing or cutting headcount as a sign of vitality. Some cite new efficiency unlocked by AI, even as economists are still searching for definitive evidence of how tools such as chatbots are changing U.S. productivity. Workforce contraction or stasis have traditionally been seen as indicators that a business or economic sector is struggling or stuck but are now touted by some corporate leaders as signs a venture is on the cutting edge. Other companies are likely to follow Amazon and Walmart's lead, citing efficiency and AI disruption as they make layoffs or temper hiring, according to economists and analysts. "Sometimes companies look for leaders, and when they see something happen with them, they use it as a cue," said David Smith, a professor of economics at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. "As more companies move into the AI space, it will put more pressure on others to do it." Google's YouTube this week offered U.S. workers voluntary buyouts, saying it was restructuring around AI. Last month, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs said they planned to slow hiring as they integrate the technology, while Nestlé said it would slash jobs over the next two years as it increased automation. Companies of all kinds are under pressure from investors to talk about AI and its benefits, said Joe Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group who covers Amazon and Walmart. "Investors are increasingly interested in how companies are using AI or planning to use it in the future," he said. Executives can send positive signals to the market by showing they have a strategy and are putting it into action, Feldman said. But Smith added that suggestions by some CEOs that AI alone is driving recent layoffs or hiring freezes are unconvincing. "I see it more as economic conditions creating pressures to cut costs," he said, even as some firms may also be investing more in AI. "It's a blended narrative." U.S. companies have become skittish over hiring this year as changing trade policy has created uncertainty and fears have grown about the strength of consumer spending, with wealthy Americans splashing out while lower-income families cut back. The U.S. economy has continued to grow, in large part because of soaring corporate investment into data centers that power AI software. But when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates this week, it said risks to employment "rose in recent months." Many tech firms, including Amazon, already slashed their workforces over recent years to correct for overexpansion during the coronavirus pandemic. AI tools from companies such as OpenAI, Google and Amazon have proved hugely popular with businesses and consumers. Workers and managers have embraced them for tasks such as summarizing large documents, drafting email or exploring large datasets. But definitive evidence of widespread increases in efficiency or productivity is yet to emerge. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) Executives around the world, across industries, expect AI tools to enable businesses to achieve huge growth at the lowest possible cost, research and advisory firm Gartner has found. "The crazy thing we're seeing is that's not necessarily happening in real life yet," said Caroline Walsh, a managing vice president at the firm. Most companies are still in the early stages of adopting the technology, Walsh said. Gartner found that a majority of U.S. layoffs were not related to AI in the first half of 2025, instead flowing from corrections to pandemic-era overhiring or other internal changes. Amazon has been aggressive about using technology to improve productivity since its founding in 1994. But the company created more than a million jobs as it grew into a giant, hiring workers at fulfillment centers across the U.S. to package and route orders. As the tech upstart emerged as second only to Walmart in U.S. private sector headcount, the two have competed for customers and workers. Amazon pushed into groceries and Walmart ramped up its own e-commerce operations. In 2021, the big box retailer said it would hire 20,000 more permanent employees to work in its high-tech logistics facilities. More recently, the tone has shifted. Amazon's workforce is tens of thousands of people smaller than in 2021, after it joined other tech firms in laying off workers after the pandemic boom in online activity ended and the Fed increased interest rates. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that he expected to "reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI." In the same month, the company said it had deployed its 1 millionth robot across its increasingly automated facilities. But on a Thursday earnings call, Jassy said the 14,000 corporate layoffs announced this week were "not financially driven or AI driven." Instead he cited a shift in the company's culture, saying Amazon's rapid growth led to too many layers of management. "With the technology transformation happening right now ... it's important to be lean, it's important to be flat, and it's important to move fast," Jassy said. "That's what we're going to do." Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the cuts announced this week only affect "a small percentage of our global team" and that the company will hire 250,000 people to work during the busy holiday period. Amazon has said adding robots to its facilities reduces physical stress on workers and creates higher skilled openings. Tom Forte, an analyst at Maxim Group, said that since Jassy took over as CEO from Bezos in 2021, he has put more emphasis on the company's bottom line in addition to focusing on revenue growth. Jassy "seems to run the business by saying we should never lose money but be willing to make less when the investment is meaningful," Forte said. It could make sense for Amazon to cut expenses like headcount to make room for more investment in the potential promise of AI, Forte said. The company joined other tech giants this week in saying it would spend more on building infrastructure to power the technology next year. Walmart's CEO McMillon said in September at the company's Opportunity Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas, that he wanted to support workers at a time of uncertainty about the impact of AI on work. "Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," he said. Carter, the Walmart spokesman, said the company will reduce some roles but expand others. "Over the next three years we expect headcount to remain flat as roles evolve. That's why we're providing associates with AI training and pathways to careers that are in high demand, both today and in the future," he said. Evidence is beginning to emerge that some jobs are already being transformed by AI. Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab in August said that certain workers are "canaries in the coal mine" of automation, with entry-level jobs becoming scarcer for AI-exposed positions such as software developers and customer service representatives. "We're in the early stages of the biggest technological revolution of my lifetime ... but we're still early," said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the lab. The "canaries suggest that bigger things are on the way." While executives may feel external pressure to adopt AI and tout the savings, solely focusing on the technology as a cost-cutting measure is shortsighted, Brynjolfsson added. AI's biggest value lies in using it to create and do things that weren't possible before, he said, a process that will take companies time to explore. As corporate leaders wait for those more transformational effects to arrive, they can still talk about their hopes for the technology as they grapple with economic uncertainty. "Nobody wants to talk about losing money," Walsh of Gartner said. But "cutting jobs in the service of investing in AI and growing, that's a more hopeful story."

Amazon lays off thousands of corporate workers as it spends big on AI

Two Amazon employees talk at one of the entrances to the company's East Coast headquarters in Virginia. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images hide caption Amazon is laying off thousands of corporate workers in an effort to slim down while it spends big on the AI race. In a note on Tuesday, Amazon human-resources executive Beth Galetti said the tech giant would cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, or about 4% of its workforce. She cited a goal of "reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs." Amazon has faced intense pressure from investors to tighten its finances. The company had ballooned its workforce, including in corporate jobs, during the pandemic. And Amazon in July reported disappointing gains in its AI business; it's a dominant cloud-computing giant, but its growth in AI is lagging behind Microsoft and other rivals. Amazon will deliver its latest financial report on Thursday. Last week, its AWS cloud service suffered one of the worst outages in its history, disrupting the work of numerous popular websites and apps, including Venmo, Reddit, Roblox and Duolingo. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in June wrote to employees about his thoughts on generative AI, saying: "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." News reports, citing company insiders, previously suggested layoffs could affect as many as 30,000 corporate jobs across human resources, cloud computing and many other divisions. Amazon's corporate layoffs come on the heels of nearly 2,000 corporate job cuts at Starbucks as part of the coffee-chain's turnaround plan, prompted by declining sales. Last week, Target also said it would cut 1,800 jobs from its corporate headcount, as it tries to right the ship with sales down or flat for almost three years. Editor's note: Amazon is among NPR's recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.

Amazon set to make up to 14,000 humans redundant as it 'innovates much faster' with AI

Amazon has confirmed it is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs this week in an effort to be more "nimble" and try to "operate like the world's largest startup." These cuts are believed to be focused on Amazon's corporate roles rather than warehouse or delivery staff and take hold as the company looks to streamline its operation thanks to AI. Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, confirmed the changes in a memo shared with Amazon staff today, October 28. "Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well," she wrote. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). "We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Amazon has always maintained a reputation for efficiency, and this latest round of cuts comes after CEO Andy Jassy decided the company had an excess of bureaucracy. He reportedly put in place an anonymous tip line that resulted in over 1,500 responses identifying inefficiencies in the company. Galetti doesn't go into specifics on which divisions are affected, but it's believed that corporate areas, including human resources, devices and services and Amazon Web Services, will all see reductions. Amazon hired aggressively during the pandemic and may be looking to readjust the balance, but it's also hard to ignore the impact of AI in this decision. And Amazon isn't the only tech giant taking this approach in 2025. Microsoft and Google have both cut thousands of human staff this year while accelerating AI automation. Microsoft is being particularly aggressive here. In April, CEO Satya Nadella told CNBC that as much as 30% of the company's code is AI-generated, and Redmond followed this up with a study revealing the 40 jobs most likely to be impacted by AI. Andy Jassy hasn't been quite as blunt as that, but the successor to Jeff Bezos said in June that AI will "change the way our work is done". He added: "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." Now it appears he's putting his prediction into practice, just a week after the world was reminded just how much it relies on the company's system. Last Monday (October 20), huge swathes of the internet were knocked offline following an AWS outage. This was caused by services -- everything from Snapchat to Venmo -- being unable to connect to a database system due to "a latent defect within the service's automated DNS [domain name system] management system". Several false fixes were implemented before normal service was resumed. Amazon's last major round of job cuts came at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 when it laid off 27,000 workers. While these cuts affect corporate staff, the company has made it clear that it's looking into robotics and automation in order to make its warehouse less reliant on human labor. The company says it will give affected employees 90 days to find a new role, and those unable to find a replacement will be given severance pay, outplacement services, and health insurance benefits.

Is AI Leading to Layoffs or Does the Economy Just Suck?

It's not a particularly good time to be a (human) worker in America. Tens of thousands of people have been laid off over the past several days, and the general outlook for job-seekers appears grim, to say the least. This week, Amazon announced plans to neutralize some 14,000 positions, while Meta said it would purge several hundred people from various offices throughout California and Washington state. Chegg, the online learning platform, announced plans to reduce its workforce by a whopping 45 percent on Monday. Several other large American companiesâ€"including FedEx, Paramount, General Motors, Target, and UPSâ€"similarly announced plans to eliminate jobs. The consensus seems to be that this sudden employment blood bath may just be the birthing pangs of the new AI ageâ€"a time in which jobs are no longer an indicator of economic success, I guess. Headlines about the layoffs have routinely included AI as a factor, a trend encouraged by the companies themselves. Indeed, in Amazon's announcement about its new downsizing, the company's executive, Beth Galetti, cited AI, noting that the company needs to be "organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Similarly, in its layoffs announcement, Chegg cited the "new realities of AI" as a factor. But is it really AI's fault, or is it just the case that the American economy is currently riding a one-way ticket to the trash heap? Is an AI-ified economy one with fewer jobs? Or does a bad economy just mean more AI? Or are the companies suffering from other ailments and simply leaning into the AI narrative for cover? NBC News recently interviewed an economic scholar who seemed skeptical of the narrative surrounding job loss and AI. “It’s much easier for a company to say, â€~We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say â€~We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’†David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. “Whether or not AI were the reason, you’d be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI,†he added. BBC, meanwhile, recently interviewed Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University, who felt that the AI talk was overblown. "A lot of this conversation feels very different to people because the phrase AI is in it," Gimbel told the outlet. "But so far, nothing that I've seen looks different than typical patterns of companies hiring and firing, particularly at this point in an economic cycle." In other words, companies may be simply saving face by pretending that losing team members and downsizing is really just part of a glorious pivot towards "leaner," "more efficient" automation. In reality, these companies may be hurting and may be taking advantage of the current narrative around AI to spin that hurt into PR gold. If you're a large company, you'd be forgiven for not feeling your best these days. Indeed, the indicators for the U.S. economy right now are, in a word, bad. Conveniently for Trump, the U.S. government continues to be shut down, which means that the organizations that would traditionally monitor and report on the nation's economic health (like the Fed) are unable to do their jobs. However, even without official government analysis, financial experts are expressing skepticism about the health of the economy. For instance, Morningstar, a financial services firm that specializes in economic analysis, recently noted that U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was lower than in previous years, and that this growth slump is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, with consumers becoming more and more cautious about spending. Additionally, consumer sentiment and the strength of the labor market have both been weakening, the report says, citing the most recent job growth data provided by the government: There are multiple ways to look at the health of the US labor market, which is tied to the overall health of the economy. Job growth is a primary indicator...The US economy added just 22,000 jobs in August as unemployment continued to rise. That number is well below what economists had previously expected and the 79,000 reported in July. The revised June numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the US economy lost 13,000 jobs in June. The report also notes that inflation has continued to stick around, and the price of goods has shot up "in response to tariffs, as producers started passing along higher import prices." In short, due to the Trump administration's bizarre policies, there is a lot of economic uncertainty right now, and uncertainty, as we all know, isn't great for markets. As an example, next month, the Supreme Court is set to rule on whether Trump's tariffsâ€"which have been challenged by lawsuitsâ€"are legal or not. If they prove to be illegal, the Trump administration may have to facilitate the repayment of all of the revenue generated by those tariffs, which would be logistically insane and a hugely disruptive process for the federal government. As we all know, uncertainty is, itself, not great for an economy, since, to confidently maneuver and make money, businesses need to know that they can put one foot in front of the other without falling down a manhole. So are layoffs happening because more companies are adopting AI or because the economy is doing poorly? Or for some other reason? From the outside, it's impossible to tell, but suffice it to say, there is definitely more than one possible explanation for why companies are currently shedding jobs like nobody's business. The situation may be more mundane

Amazon reportedly set to lay off up to 30,000 corporate employees in massive workforce cut

Amazon is preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees in a sweeping workforce reduction intended to reduce expenses and compensate for over-hiring during the pandemic, according to a report from Reuters on Monday. GeekWire has contacted Amazon for comment. Layoff notifications will start going out via email on Tuesday, according to Reuters, which cited people familiar with the matter. One employee at Amazon told GeekWire the workforce is on "pins and needles" in anticipation of cuts. Amazon's corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 in early 2023. It has not provided an updated number since then. The company's last significant layoff occurred in 2023 when it cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages. Since then the company has made a series of smaller layoffs across different business units. Fortune reported this month that Amazon planned to cut up to 15% of its human resources staff as part of a wider layoff. Amazon has taken a cautious hiring approach with its corporate workforce, following years of huge headcount growth. The company's corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information. The reported cuts come as Amazon is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The company said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025, up from $83 billion in 2024, with a majority going toward building out capacity for AI in AWS. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also hinted at potential workforce impact from generative AI earlier this year in a memo to employees that was shared publicly. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," he wrote. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." Amazon reported 1.54 million total employees as of June 30 -- up 3% year-over-year. The majority of the company's workforce is made up of warehouse workers. Amazon employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in buildings across its Seattle headquarters, with another 12,000 in Bellevue. The company reports its third quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon. Fellow Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft has laid off more than 15,000 people since May as it too invests in AI and data center capacity. Microsoft has cut more than 3,200 roles in Washington this year. Last week, The New York Times cited internal Amazon documents and interviews to report that the company plans to automate as much as 75% of its warehouse operations by 2033. According to the report, the robotics team expects automation to "flatten Amazon's hiring curve over the next 10 years," allowing it to avoid hiring more than 600,000 workers even as sales continue to grow.

Amazon CEO says layoffs aren't about AI

The job market slump we're seeing right now is complicated by other factors. AI -- though certainly disruptive -- is lower down on the list. State of play: On an earnings call Thursday, Jassy was asked about the company's headcount. * "The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now, at least," the Amazon CEO said. * "It really -- it's culture. And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers." Zoom out: There's still a surprising amount of hiring hangover in tech, even in 2025. * Companies went on hiring binges coming out of the pandemic, when software engineers could name their price and job-hopping was everywhere. * The correction began with layoffs in 2023 and has been slowly grinding along since. Employers are barely hiring right now. The big picture: With the government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn't putting out job reports and it's difficult to see the full scope of what's happening. * It's certainly possible AI is driving layoffs this month, but it didn't make the list of the top three leading causes for layoffs this year, per a recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks layoffs. Zoom in: The top three reasons: Between the lines: The U.S. labor market is massive, with an incredible amount of turnover. * It's hard to extrapolate a trend from a few anecdotes. * In any given month there are around 1.5 million layoffs -- even in the best job markets. * In 2022, when the labor market was red hot there were around 1.3 million layoffs a month, per the BLS. In August, the number was about 1.7 million -- still lower than pre-pandemic trends. "I'm very skeptical of extracting signal from headline layoff notices," Ernie Tedeschi, former chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Axios earlier this week. * There's no question the job market is weak -- the unemployment rate moved up a full percentage point over the past year. * But this story is bigger than AI. * "I think companies are under a lot of pressure to tell investors and boards that they're adopting AI," Tedeschi said. By the numbers: Amazon's headcount exploded in the pandemic to around 1.6 million full- and part-time employees, mostly blue-collar employees. * At the start of 2019, the company had about 650,000 employees. * It's been cutting back for the past three years, beginning in 2022, when it laid off 10,000 employees in its corporate divisions -- about 3% of that specific workforce. Yes, but: Jassy in the past has said that Amazon won't need to hire as many people because of AI.

Amazon confirms plans to cut 14,000 jobs in a move it says will make the company "even stronger"

Divisions across the entire Amazon corporate workforce could be affected Amazon has confirmed plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs as it looks to operate more effectively. In a note first shared with Amazon employees and then published online, the company noted the move would allow it to be "organized more leanly" and seize the opportunity provided by AI. Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, noted the cuts would make Amazon "even stronger", meaning it could shift resources, "to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs". The move is reportedly a response to Amazon's overhiring during the pandemic, when demand for all kinds of products spiked, leading to a huge expansion. "We're convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," Galetti added. Amazon has around 1.55 million employees across the entire company, but the cuts will affect its 350,000 corporate workers, with report claiming a number of divisions and roles could be hit, with human resources, known as People Experience and Technology (PXT), operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services teams all set to be affected. The move will be Amazon's largest ever job losses, ahead of the 27,000 positions it cut back in 2022 in a bid apparently to save on expenditure, and are slightly better than earlier reports claiming up to 30,000 workers could be let go. Company CEO Andy Jassy had warned earlier in 2025 that the rise in AI technology in major corporations such as Amazon would likely lead to job cuts. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," he said in a memo sent to Amazon staff June 2025. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." Jassy added staff who embraced such changes would be "well-positioned" at the company, noting Amazon was already using AI agents in "virtually every corner of the company", adding, "many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they're coming and coming fast." The news is the latest in a series of layoffs by tech giants in recent months as they take stock of their workforce in the new AI driven world. Meta recently cut 600 jobs in its AI division, with Salesforce confirming it had also lost 4000 support jobs in favor of AI tools. Around 9,000 Microsoft workers also lost their jobs in July 2025, with around 6,000 also going in May and several hundred in other, smaller adjustments.

A 'jobless profit boom' has cemented a permanent loss in payrolls as AI displaces labor at a faster rate, strategist says | Fortune

Booming corporate earnings and a slumping labor market have been telling very different stories lately, and AI is the likely explanation, according to Chen Zhao, chief global strategist at Alpine Macro. That dichotomy is exemplified in the tech sector, which has seen profits soar while employment has been in a "recession" for three years, he said in a Monday note titled "A Jobless Profit Boom." "We suspect that job losses in tech have been driven mainly by AI displacement," Zhao added, pointing to recent cuts at Amazon, Meta and Salesforce. "These layoffs, however, are happening amid exceptionally strong profit growth in these companies -- a significant departure from the past, when job cuts typically followed declining profitability." This jobless profit boom isn't limited to the tech sector and has quickly become an economy-wide phenomenon, he said. In fact, while overall private-sector payrolls have rebounded from the early days of COVID, it is still 5% below where the pre-pandemic trend would have been by this time. "In other words, there has been a permanent loss of jobs since the pandemic crisis, even as corporate profits have surged to record highs," Zhao said. At the same time, productivity has been surging in recent years, and it is currently growing more than twice as fast as it did in the previous decade. Zhao thinks AI is the reason and noted the technology is displacing labor at an accelerating pace. But while labor demand is down, aging demographics and President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown have weakened labor supply as well. Those trends have created a new equilibrium that are keeping a lid on unemployment even as hiring stays subdued. "Under normal circumstances, slower labor force growth should weigh on economic growth," Zhao explained. "However, rising productivity has allowed the U.S. economy to produce more output -- and higher profits -- with fewer workers." The analysis from Alpine Macro, which is part of Oxford Economics, reinforces what computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has been saying about AI's impact on the labor market and the role of companies leading the charge. In an interview with Bloomberg TV's Wall Street Week on Friday, he said the obvious way to make money off AI investments, aside from charging fees to use chatbots, is to replace workers with something cheaper. Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker "godfather of AI," added that while some economists point out previous disruptive technologies created as well as destroyed jobs, it's not clear to him that AI will do the same. "I think the big companies are betting on it causing massive job replacement by AI, because that's where the big money is going to be," he warned. The remarks echo what he said in September, when he told the Financial Times that AI will "create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits," attributing it to the capitalist system.

AI Blamed for Tens of Thousands of White Collar Layoffs

There's no question that the job market is a mess. According to Labor Department data, nearly two million Americans have been without a job for 27 weeks or more, the highest figure since 2022. And it's hitting white collar jobs hard: this week alone, Amazon cut its corporate workforce by 14,000 jobs, UPS cut 34,000 operational workforce positions, and Target and Paramount axed 1,800 and 1,000 jobs, respectively. Many are blaming those cuts on AI. Everyone from Senator Bernie Sanders to Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is wringing their hands about the tech's effect on employment. Mike Hoffman, CEO of growth advisory firm SBI, told the Wall Street Journal that productivity surged when he cut his software development team by 80 percent. And Meta just culled 600 employees from the AI Superintelligence lab -- after dropping billions to beef up the team -- and blamed advancements in automation. Others aren't so sure. New research found that even the world's strongest AI agents struggled to perform the vast majority of tasks that companies currently lean on independent contractors for. According to a recent study from MIT, 95 percent of companies that adopt AI see zero meaningful revenue growth. Some companies are finding they're forced to hire contractors to fix AI's mistakes, or even to re-hire staff they terminated in favor of the tech. It all raises an interesting counter-possibility: maybe instead of AI actually replacing human-level intellectual labor, bosses are running with the narrative that it's ready to replace human workers to justify layoffs -- when what's really happening is they're offloading work onto a smaller human workforce, or forcing their overburdened remaining employees to produce lower quality results. The reality is that there are other major headwinds dragging down the economy. The US is now in a perpetual state of political uncertainty that has directly impacted many employers. President Donald Trump's tariffs were announced, postponed, instated, rolled back, rinsed and repeated; his restrictive immigration policies and deportations are shrinking the workforce and increasing labor costs; cutting the $7,500 consumer incentive for electric vehicles is forcing layoffs in that sector. AI is a flashy scapegoat for mounting white collar layoffs, in other words, and if it keeps improving, it may eventually pose a real threat to jobs. But for now, it feels more like a bogeyman to rationalize short-term cost cutting -- and any companies that indulge in it may find that they're undermining their reputation and institutional knowledge for years to come.

Amazon confirms plan to cut 14,000 corporate jobs in AI push

Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Amazon said Tuesday it will reduce its corporate workforce by about 14,000 roles, framing the decision as part of a broader shift toward AI and a leaner structure. Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, told employees the cuts are aimed at making the organization faster and more efficient. She wrote in a memo: "The reductions we're sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs. "While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles." Galetti said affected employees will be supported through internal transfers and transition services like "severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits." She pointed to AI as reshaping how Amazon operates, calling it "the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Chief Executive Andy Jassy signaled earlier this year that the workforce would shrink as more tasks were automated. In June, he said advances in AI would "reduce" the company's corporate headcount in the years ahead. Jassy also made layoffs in late 2022 and early 2023 that cut about 27,000 corporate jobs. Galetti also referenced Jassy's push for cultural change, citing his earlier note to staff about Amazon operating "like the world's largest startup." She added that the latest cuts are part of that effort to increase ownership and reduce layers. Amazon employed about 1.55 million full-time and part-time workers worldwide as of June 30, including warehouse staff, drivers and corporate employees. Reuters initially reported the job losses could ultimately affect as many as 30,000 roles. The company is due to report earnings for the quarter ending Sept. 30 on Thursday.

Tens of thousands of layoffs are being blamed on AI. What are companies actually getting?

Amazon has announced a reorganization that would result in the elimination of 14,000 positions.Mark Lennihan / AP file Some of the largest companies in America have begun capping or reducing their head counts, blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions. Yet, so far, there is uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it. This leaves some experts questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons, such as financial underperformance or global economic uncertainty. "It's much easier for a company to say, 'We are laying workers off because we're realizing AI-related efficiencies' than to say 'We're laying people off because we're not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an email to NBC News. "Whether or not AI were the reason, you'd be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI," wrote Autor, an expert on AI's impact on workers. This week, Amazon announced it had begun a reorganization that would result in the elimination of 14,000 roles -- and said AI was a leading cause. "The world is changing quickly," Amazon Senior Vice President Beth Galetti wrote Tuesday. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before." Yet a few hours later, a different Amazon representative tried to downplay the role that AI played in the layoff decisions. "AI is not the reason behind the vast majority of reductions," said the representative, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to give her name. "Last year, we set out to strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers," among other measures, she said. "The reductions we're sharing today are a continuation of this work." The representative declined to comment on the apparent mismatch between this second statement about AI and Amazon's earlier comments. But that disparity -- coming from a company as large and disciplined as Amazon -- highlights how difficult it can be for the public to verify what companies say about AI and its role in personnel decisions. Amazon joins plenty of other companies in justifying recent job cuts by pointing to AI. Walmart recently signaled that it intends to keep headcount flat over the next several years, largely as a result of AI. Goldman Sachs announced a fresh round of layoffs this month, saying it planned to reduce human roles that AI could potentially perform. Salesforce recently reduced its workforce by 4,000, citing "the benefits and efficiencies" of AI. One might think that these companies were all seeing huge benefits from AI, the kind of returns that would make these difficult -- and expensive -- layoffs worthwhile. Indeed, the number of companies that report being focused on AI's return on investment has surged in recent months, according to data from AlphaSense, an AI research firm. So where, exactly, are all these benefits? That's where it gets tricky. Recent studies have found significant limits on the productivity of AI, at least in its current manifestation. Out of 1,250 firms surveyed by Boston Consulting Group for a September report, 60% said they had seen "minimal revenue and cost gains despite substantial investment" in AI. Only 10% of the organizations involved in a similar Deloitte survey said they were getting "significant return on investment from agentic AI," or systems that can make decisions beyond simply following prompts. Nonetheless, more large American companies than ever are using, investing in and measuring the business impact of generative AI, according to a new report from UPenn's Wharton School and GBK Collective. But like the other surveys, the Wharton report shows mixed results. "It's great if you can shave 20 minutes off an email or half an hour reading a report. But that's not going to leapfrog anything," said Stefano Puntoni, faculty co-director of Human-AI Research at Wharton and an author of the study. Many of the same companies that are making layoff announcements while touting AI investments have also been under increased financial pressure. Amazon's layoffs announcement comes ahead of its third quarter earnings results, set to be released Thursday. While analysts expect improvement, there is growing concern about increased competition for Amazon's AWS cloud platform from AI. After hitting an all-time high in January, shares of Amazon have been largely flat this year and are about 6% below that record. Meanwhile, Salesforce shares are down about 29% from a December 2024 high. Some analysts have questioned whether implementing more AI will be enough to stave off the threat posed by AI to Salesforce's core product lineup. "No matter what the current state of the company, the narrative is negative and just about impossible to disprove," wrote Jackson Ader, an analyst with KeyBanc Capital financial group. Some of the companies enacting job cuts are simply looking to rein in spending -- including firms at the core of the AI boom. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced it was cutting 600 roles in its AI unit over concerns that it had become "bloated." Rival Microsoft has announced three separate rounds of layoffs this year, and says it is looking to cut costs elsewhere in the company in order to pay for its massive AI investments. Yet even firms far from Silicon Valley are getting swept up. UPS said Tuesday it had eliminated 34,000 roles from its operational division, which includes drivers and package handlers -- a 70% increase from its previous target. UPS also plans to reduce its reliance on seasonal hires and significantly cut back on vehicle leases. These changes are "powered by automation," the company said -- corporate shorthand for AI. UPS is "freeing up our network to grow in the best parts of the market," a spokesperson said. "AI and robotics help to make jobs safer, while also reducing repetitive tasks."

'This generation of AI is...enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,' says Amazon, as it confirms that 14,000 corporate roles will be laid off

Earlier today, Amazon sent an email to all its employees to explain why it needed to make "organizational changes" that would result in 14,000 corporate roles being laid off. The message carried the usual phrases one sees in missives from senior management: more leanly, fewer layers, more ownership, move as quickly as possible. The reason why all of that is now required was also laid bare, and it's AI. The message in question came from Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology. In it, she confirmed that the retail and server giant is reducing its workforce: "While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles." Galetti says that Amazon's recruiting teams will "prioritize internal candidates to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon." The obvious questions to ask are just what roles have been laid off, and what positions are such people expected to take on? Although the answers to these questions aren't explicitly answered in Galetti's message, there is one statement that, to all intents and purposes, does: "Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we're delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." In other words, Amazon is replacing a range of roles with AI, and any new positions will be for the management and creation of said AI tools. If you think I'm reading too much between the lines, then don't take my word for it -- Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, says it is: "Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company." And Amazon's job cuts might not stop at 14,000 either, as Reuters reports that up to 30,000 corporate roles will be dropped. This figure might pale against Amazon's total workforce of 1.55 million people, but it's approximately 10% of all corporate positions, including "human resources, known as People Experience and Technology or PXT; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services," according to Reuters. The fact that Amazon is reducing its workforce isn't perhaps entirely unsurprising, or at least, not in itself. For example, it's well known that Amazon overhired during the Covid-19 pandemic, to meet the enormous demands from home-bound shoppers, and that it has been trying to compensate for this over the past few years. However, Reuters notes that AWS (Amazon Web Services), the company's most profitable sector, is underperforming compared to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, in terms of profit increases. And a post on X by a user called End suggests that there's a deeper reason behind the job cuts: AWS is not buying enough GPUs to meet customer demands. AI GPUs are, of course, exceptionally expensive, and while Amazon is developing its own chips, the vast majority of customers are served through AMD and Nvidia-powered instances on its servers. If all of this is true, it means that the AI sword that's cutting down the jobs is double-edged. One side is Amazon itself using generative systems to replace human workers, the other side is the demand for AI services via AWS. Amazon is essentially doing the former to pay for the latter. Given the colossal cost of AI servers, 30 thousand jobs cuts may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Amazon cutting 14,000 jobs as the retailing giant embraces AI

Amazon on Tuesday said it is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs as the retailing giant relies more on artificial intelligence and moves to lower its wage bill. Earlier this year, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon's investment in AI tools would allow the company to reduce its human workforce as the business becomes more efficient. Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, on Tuesday said in a statement that the job cuts would allow Amazon "to operate like the world's largest startup." "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly," she added. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)."

Amazon will cut 14,000 corporate roles, nods to AI-driven changes

Why it matters: Big companies are starting to cut back headquarters positions in an uncertain economy, where AI is increasingly capable of supplanting many roles. What they're saying: "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)," Amazon senior vice president Beth Galetti wrote in a blog post. * "We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." * Galetti also noted the company would continue hiring in some areas in 2026, while making cuts in others. Editor's note: This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.

Amazon could cut up to 30,000 corporate roles - Reuters

After its CEO said in June that AI would lead to corporate jobs cuts, Reuters is reporting that Amazon will begin today to lay off up to 30,000 people in corporate roles. Today will see the beginning of a programme to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs worldwide at Amazon, according to reporting from Reuters, who say the company is aiming to cut costs and compensate for overhiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the move would represent a relatively small percentage of Amazon's more than 1.5m total employees, it would represent some 10pc of its corporate employees and be the largest cut since January and March 2023 when Amazon announced cuts of some 27,000 positions. Reuters is citing three sources familiar with the situation, who say that managers of the relevant teams were offered training to prepare for how they will communicate with staff once the cuts begin today, but Amazon has declined to comment on the story. Jobs effected could include human resources, devices and services - including Amazon Web Services (AWS) - according to the report. Amazon has been cutting smaller numbers of employees in recent years. In 2024 when AWS announced cuts of several hundred, a company spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com that the company identified a few targeted areas that "we need to streamline" to continue focusing on "key strategic areas". But in June of this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company expected artificial intelligence to reduce its total corporate workforce, and if Reuters' reporting is correct, this could be the outcome of that comment. Somewhat ironically, the reporting comes just a week after a major AWS outage (October 24) was blamed on faulty automation, and required manual operator intervention. The outage affected millions of users around the world as several dozen websites, from Perplexity to Canva, Signal to Atlassian, went down. The outage, AWS explained, was triggered by a latent defect in its automated DNS management system that caused endpoint resolution failures for DynamoDB which maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records. The error required manual operator intervention to correct, AWS said in a lengthy statement. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Everyone thinks AI is replacing factory workers, but Amazon's layoffs show it's coming for middle management first | Fortune

Just as news outlets shared leaked Amazon documents suggesting the company could replace half a million warehouse jobs with robots, the e-commerce giant pulled the rug out and laid off 14,000 middle managers instead. The move may offer an early glimpse of how AI is actually reshaping the labor force: not by immediately displacing the tactile, mundane factory roles everyone expected, but by hollowing out the white-collar ranks that run them. Amazon announced Tuesday that it will cut roughly 14,000 corporate jobs, or about 4% of its white-collar workforce, as part of a restructuring meant to "reduce bureaucracy" and "remove organizational layers," according to a memo. In the memo, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience at Amazon, said the cuts are designed to make the company leaner and more agile as it expands its investments in generative AI. In plain terms, it's a bet that algorithms can handle many of the coordination, reporting, and decision-making functions once reserved for human managers. Over the past year, CEO Andy Jassy has been frank about Amazon's transformation. "We'll need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today," he told employees earlier this year, citing generative AI's growing role in planning, analytics, and forecasting. Those tools, he said, are already helping teams "move faster and make better decisions." That logic is spreading across corporate America. Generative-AI systems have become adept at precisely the kinds of tasks that fill middle managers' days: synthesizing updates, drafting memos, producing status reports, and summarizing meetings. It's unclear if the layoffs announced Tuesday are a direct result of that calculation, that gen-AI can perform middle-management tasks just as well, or better, than humans can. However, for executives under pressure to boost productivity at lower costs -- and especially for those with a penchant for cutting -- the appeal of flattening the hierarchy is obvious. Yet, there's an irony here. Amazon -- the company that pioneered warehouse automation and made robots the poster child of blue-collar disruption -- is now signaling that the white-collar workforce may be first to feel AI's bite. Analysts at Gartner estimate that by 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to eliminate at least half of their management layers. The timing couldn't be worse for workers, particularly younger ones, who are trying to move up. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned in September that hiring has slowed "in a noticeable way," especially for early-career employees. Powell and other economists have acknowledged that the economy has entered a "low-hire, low-fire" phase, where companies are reluctant to add jobs even as growth continues. If AI flattens corporate hierarchies, creating a "low-hire, high-fire" market, that could further erode the traditional career ladder and potentially be destructive across all layers of the economy. This just so happens to be the picture painted by the latest Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, released October 2. According to the outplacement and executive coaching company, U.S. employers announced 946,000 job cuts so far this year, the highest year-to-date total since 2020, with over 17,000 explicitly attributed to artificial intelligence and another 20,000 tied to automation and "technological updates." Tech firms alone have shed 108,000 jobs in 2025, and retail layoffs are up 203% year-over-year as companies brace for a slower holiday season, the company said. "It's very likely job cut plans are going to surpass a million for the first time since 2020," Andy Challenger, senior VP at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, wrote in the report. "Previous periods with this many job cuts occurred either during recessions or, as was the case in 2005 and 2006, during the first wave of automations that cost jobs in manufacturing and technology."

Amazon layoffs highlight impact of AI, some experts say: 'Wake-up call'

Amazon said Tuesday it will lay off thousands of corporate workers, citing AI. Amazon is set to lay off thousands of corporate workers, despite billions in profits and lucrative lines of business spanning from e-commerce to cloud computing. The reason is artificial intelligence, the company said in a memo to employees on Tuesday. "Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well," wrote Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," Galetti added. The extensive job cuts at a high-profile tech giant mark the latest in a series of layoffs top executives have attributed to AI, citing efficiency gains and shifting company priorities, some experts told ABC News. Such job losses underscore the threat posed by AI, especially for some white-collar corporate positions, but the ultimate business impact of the technology remains uncertain and other factors like a slowing economy may be to blame for some of the corporate downsizing, they added. "This is a wake-up call. And if Amazon does it, other companies might do it too," Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told ABC News. But, he added: "AI will affect a lot of different workers and businesses in ways we can't anticipate. We have to keep monitoring it and help them adapt when changes occur." The fresh round of layoffs at Amazon follows other high-profile job cuts attributed to AI. Software company Salesforce cut 4,000 customer service jobs in September, just months after the company said AI could perform up to 50% of its work. Airline Lufthansa slashed 4,000 positions that same month, citing the "increased use of artificial intelligence." Online learning company Chegg said on Monday it had cut 45% of its global workforce -- which amounts to 388 jobs -- because new AI tools had significantly reduced web traffic previously generated by Google searches. Chegg slashed employees as it made its own investment in AI in an effort to deliver services with a "substantially lower cost structure," the company said. The World Economic Forum this year surveyed 1,000 large companies worldwide, estimating 92 million jobs lost over the next five years as a result of AI adoption, but anticipating the creation of 170 million jobs. The AI-related layoffs at Amazon and some other firms reflect a "hollowing out of middle-skilled workers," Lynn Wu, a professor of operations, information and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania, told ABC News. "Amazon is not cutting warehouse workers. Robots can't do what hands do yet," Wu said. "And very high-skill workers -- people developing robots and building AI -- are still in high demand." The fresh round of layoffs affect a fraction of Amazon's worldwide workforce, which amounted to 1.56 million people at the end of last year. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that the company plans to revamp its positions as it adopts AI, telling employees in a memo that Amazon would need "fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." Amazon said on Tuesday that it plans to "continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains." United Parcel Service (UPS) said Tuesday the company had cut 14,000 management positions this year, while slashing an additional 34,000 operational roles. UPS sought to "create a more efficient operating model that was more responsive to market dynamics," the company said, but its announcement did not mention AI. To be sure, some experts downplayed the impact of AI, saying the productivity benefits of the technology remain uncertain and recent layoffs may owe to a host of other factors, including a wider economic slowdown. Many economists expect AI to add new job opportunities, even as it eliminates others, they noted. In August, a report issued by MIT's Media Lab found 95% of corporate AI initiatives generate zero return. The study examined more than 300 publicly disclosed AI ventures, drawing on over 150 surveys of executives. "AI is an extremely useful, transformative technology, but I think we still need to work on it more to realize its full effects," Isabella Loaiza, a researcher at MIT who studies AI and the workforce, told ABC News. "The role AI is playing in job losses is perhaps being overstated." "Companies really, really want to make AI work," Loaiza added, but the ultimate implications of their initiatives for the labor market remains unclear. "It's hard to know," she added.

Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate jobs as spending on artificial intelligence accelerates

Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while cutting costs elsewhere. Teams and individuals impacted by the job cuts will be notified on Tuesday. Most workers will be given 90 days to look for a new position internally, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, wrote in a letter to employees on Tuesday. Those who can't find a new role at the company or who opt not to look for one will be provided transitional support including severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits. Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. The cuts announced Tuesday amount to about a 4% reduction in its corporate workforce. In June CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively sought to cut costs since becoming CEO in 2021, said that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon's corporate workforce in the next few years. Jassy said at the time that Amazon had more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure was a "small fraction" of what it plans to build. Amazon has announced plans to invest $10 billion building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it builds up its infrastructure to try to keep up with other tech giants making leaps in AI. Amazon is competing with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and others. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy said that the potential for growth in the company's AWS business is massive. "If you believe your mission is to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you're going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that's what we're doing. You can see that in the 1,000-plus AI applications we're building across Amazon. You can see that with our next generation of Alexa, named Alexa+," he said. Amazon's workforce doubled during the pandemic as millions stayed home and boosted online spending. In the following years, big tech and retail companies cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line. The cuts announced Tuesday suggests Amazon is still trying to get the size of its workforce right and it may not be over. It was the biggest culling at Amazon since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs. Those cuts came in waves, with 9,000 jobs trimmed in March of that year, and another 18,000 employees two months later. Amazon has not said if more job cuts are on the way. Yet the jobs market which has for years been a pillar in the U.S. economy, is showing signs of weakening. Layoffs have been limited, but the same can be said for hiring. Government hiring data is on hold during the government shut down, but earlier this month a survey by payroll company ADP showed a surprising loss of 32,000 jobs losses in the private sector in September. Many retailers are pulling back on seasonal hiring this year due to uncertainty over the U.S. economy and tariffs. Amazon Inc. said this month, however, that it would hire 250,000 seasonal workers, the same as last year's holiday season. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, said in a statement that the layoffs "represent a deep cleaning of Amazon's corporate workforce." "Unlike the Target layoffs, Amazon is operating from a position of strength," he said. "The company has been producing good growth, and it still has a lot of headroom for further expansion in both the U.S. and overseas." But Saunders noted that Amazon is not immune to outside factors, as global markets tighten and underlying costs climb. "It needs to act if it wants to continue with a good bottom-line performance. This is especially so given the amount of investment the company is making in areas like logistics and AI. In some ways, this is a tipping point away from human capital to technological infrastructure," he said. Amazon will post quarterly financial results on Thursday. During its most recent quarter, the company reported 17.5% growth for its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services.

Amazon to lay off 14,000 corporate employees

Amazon said Tuesday that it plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, its biggest round of layoffs in years, as it invests more in artificial intelligence. In Amazon's announcement, top human resources executive Beth Galetti cited AI, which she said the "most transformative technology we've seen since the internet." She added that AI was "enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before." "We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," Galetti continued. In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent employees at the company an email with the subject line "Some thoughts on Generative AI." In it, Jassy signaled that Amazon's workforce would likely shrink in the future. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing and more people doing other types of jobs," he wrote. Jassy continued, "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." Amazon had 1.55 million employees worldwide at the end of the second quarter, which ended on June 30, according to a filing. About 350,000 of those work in corporate offices, Reuters reported. The tech giant said it would give employees whose roles are eliminated Tuesday "90 days to look for a new role internally," with recruiters prioritizing internal candidates "to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon." Amazon has in recent years also ordered corporate employees back into the office and asked them to move closer to the physical office locations where they are based. Workers were told in June to relocate to Amazon hubs such as Seattle and the Virginia area, Bloomberg News reported. Those locations are where two of Amazon's regional headquarters are located. Amazon is set to announce its third quarter earnings on Thursday. Wall Street analysts expect the company, which currently has a market value of more than $2.4 trillion, to report revenue of more than $170 billion. Tuesday's cuts may only be the beginning. Galetti said Amazon expects "to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains."

Amazon laying off 14,000 corporate jobs amid AI push

Amazon said Tuesday that it is cutting about 14,000 corporate roles as the e-commerce giant expands its investment in AI. Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, said in a blog post that the layoffs are part of an effort to continue "reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets." "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones)," Galetti wrote in the message that was initially shared with Amazon employees. "We're convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she continued. As of July, Amazon employed nearly 1.55 million workers. Its corporate workforce is smaller than its warehouse workforce, accounting for about 350,000 roles, according to CNBC. The latest cuts represent a 4 percent reduction on the corporate side. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted at this development in June, when he said the company expected to reduce its corporate workforce in the next few years given efficiency gains from AI. "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy said at the time. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs."

Amazon Just Announced 14,000 Layoffs. CEO Andy Jassy Meant It When He Said AI Would Replace Jobs

Earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors that artificial intelligence would "change the way our work is done." It turns out, that wasn't just a CEO being optimistic about how technology was going to change everything-for the better, of course. Now it looks like he meant exactly what he said. This morning, Amazon announced it was cutting 14,000 corporate jobs, roughly 5 percent of its white-collar workforce. Reuters previously reported the total number could be closer to 30,000. Layoffs aren't uncommon-especially for tech companies. Layoffs.fyi, a site that monitors the tech industry, says that companies have already let go of more than 90,000 employees this year. Typically, they're a thing that happens after a period of overhiring. As markets slow, executives make "difficult decisions." To some extent, this is a continuation of that trend. Amazon went on a hiring spree during the pandemic in order to keep up with the surging demand that came along with hundreds of millions of people all staying home and ordering everything online. But there's more to this round of layoffs than just the usual response to changing market conditions. As I mentioned before, Jassy has been signaling this was coming for a while. In June, he told CNBC that generative AI would mean that the types of roles the company needed would shift. "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy said. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." At the time, it just seemed like the kind of thing a CEO says to show they're paying attention to the latest technology. But inside the company, it became essentially a mandate. Amazon's internal teams have been testing AI tools for HR workflows, code generation, procurement, and even customer-service decision trees. Many of the functions once performed by analysts, coordinators, or middle managers can now be automated -- or at least reduced to oversight. Jassy's logic is straightforward: if AI can do a job faster or better, you need fewer people doing those jobs. Multiply that across a corporate organization of hundreds of thousands, and you start to understand the scale and why this is so appealing to a company like Amazon. It's also a cultural statement. Amazon has long preached "Day 1" thinking -- a mantra about staying nimble and avoiding bureaucracy. Cutting tens of thousands of roles signals that the company is willing to tear down its own bureaucracy to stay true to that ideal. But there's a human cost. Thirty thousand corporate employees aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. Replacing them with code may make financial sense, but it risks something harder to measure: trust. The other thing that makes this seem different from past layoffs is who is affected. Amazon has already optimized its warehouses. It isn't cutting the workers who handle packages -- in fact, the company plans to hire 250,000 seasonal employees to ramp up for the holidays. The target here is those employees in the middle -- the analysts and managers who keep corporate operations running. Generative AI can do a lot of the things Amazon pays those employees to do. In fact, it's pretty good at things like analyzing data, creating reports, summarizing findings, and even generating performance reviews. Amazon isn't alone. Across the tech industry, executives are pitching AI as both a way to reduce the cost of paying humans for their work, and for making the ones you do pay much more efficient. Sure, they use different words, to some extent. The pitch they sell you up front is that AI will make people far more productive and save them time on routine tasks. Of course, that productivity and time add up, and eventually you need fewer people in those roles. Amazon's scale also means that this decision has a huge impact, even beyond just the number of people affected. Laying off thousands of employees, and making up for their work through automation and generative AI doesn't just set a precedent -- it normalizes it. The risk, of course, is that efficiency becomes the only thing that matters. If you're looking at your employees as costs to be reduced, there's a real risk that even those who remain will be a little less productive as they look over their shoulder at the AI coming for their job. Not only that, but when efficiency drives every decision, empathy tends to be the first casualty. Still, Jassy isn't wrong about where things are headed. AI will make companies more efficient. It will reshape the corporate workforce. And the leaders who understand that early will have a head start. The question isn't whether automation will replace jobs -- it already is. The question is what kind of company you become when it does. Like this column? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you'll never miss a post. The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Amazon is pushing out thousands of workers into a job market that suddenly isn't hiring | Fortune

Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while cutting costs elsewhere. In June CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively sought to cut costs since becoming CEO in 2021, said that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon's corporate workforce in the next few years. Jassy said at the time that Amazon had more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure was a "small fraction" of what it plans to build. Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the company's AI plans after it announced plans to invest $10 billion building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it builds up its infrastructure to try to keep up with other tech giants making leaps in AI. Amazon is competing with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and others. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy said that the potential for growth in the company's AWS business is massive. "If you believe your mission is to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you're going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that's what we're doing. You can see that in the 1,000-plus AI applications we're building across Amazon. You can see that with our next generation of Alexa, named Alexa+," he said. Teams and individuals impacted by the job cuts will be notified on Tuesday. Most workers will be given 90 days to look for a new position internally, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, wrote in a letter to employees on Tuesday. Those who can't find a new role at the company or who opt not to look for one will be provided transitional support including severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits. Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. The cuts announced Tuesday amount to about a 4% reduction in its corporate workforce. Amazon's workforce doubled during the pandemic as millions stayed home and boosted online spending. In the following years, big tech and retail companies cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line. The cuts announced Tuesday suggests Amazon is still trying to get the size of its workforce right and it may not be over. It was the biggest culling at Amazon since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs. Those cuts came in waves, with 9,000 jobs trimmed in March of that year, and another 18,000 employees two months later. Amazon has not said if more job cuts are on the way. Yet the jobs market which has for years been a pillar in the U.S. economy, is showing signs of weakening. Layoffs have been limited, but the same can be said for hiring. Government hiring data is on hold during the government shut down, but earlier this month a survey by payroll company ADP showed a surprising loss of 32,000 jobs losses in the private sector in September. Many retailers are pulling back on seasonal hiring this year due to uncertainty over the U.S. economy and tariffs. Amazon Inc. said this month, however, that it would hire 250,000 seasonal workers, the same as last year's holiday season. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, said in a statement that the layoffs "represent a deep cleaning of Amazon's corporate workforce." "Unlike the Target layoffs, Amazon is operating from a position of strength," he said. "The company has been producing good growth, and it still has a lot of headroom for further expansion in both the U.S. and overseas." But Saunders noted that Amazon is not immune to outside factors, as global markets tighten and underlying costs climb. "It needs to act if it wants to continue with a good bottom-line performance. This is especially so given the amount of investment the company is making in areas like logistics and AI. In some ways, this is a tipping point away from human capital to technological infrastructure," he said. Amazon will post quarterly financial results on Thursday. During its most recent quarter, the company reported 17.5% growth for its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Lays Off 14,000 Corporate Staff, One of the Largest Job Cuts in Its History

According to the post, Amazon is offering several support measures and severance packages to corporate employees affected by the layoffs. Most employees will have 90 days to search for new roles within Amazon, during which their pay and benefits will continue. Those who do not secure another position internally during this notice period will receive transition support, including severance pay and health insurance benefits. The layoffs are part of an ongoing effort to streamline bureaucracy and redirect resources toward high-growth areas, particularly AI initiatives. Amazon is making significant investments in AI infrastructure, with capital expenditures projected to exceed $120 billion for the year, up almost 50% from last year. Amazon is the world's second-largest private employer, with about 1.5 million people working for the company, mostly in warehouse roles. Out of its entire global workforce, roughly 350,000 are corporate employees; that means the recent plan to cut 14,000 corporate jobs affects about 4% of Amazon's corporate staff. Related: Amazon Just Unveiled AI Smart Glasses for Its Drivers -- Here's What They Actually Do Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned in June that AI would cause the company to reduce its workforce. In a memo to staff, Jassy wrote that Amazon "will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." He wrote that he expects Amazon to reduce its total corporate headcount over the next few years due to AI, and that employees should learn to use AI tools and accomplish more with fewer team members. Amazon is carrying out the layoffs to make the company leaner and less bureaucratic, even though the e-commerce giant is on good financial footing. According to its second-quarter earnings report, released on July 31, Amazon achieved a net profit of $18.2 billion for the second quarter of the year, a 35% increase compared to the same period last year. This performance was accompanied by $167.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, and an operating income of $19.2 billion, increasing 31% from Q2 2024. Amazon's Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti, addressed why the company is reducing roles despite its solid performance. According to Galetti, AI enables Amazon to innovate more quickly. Amazon needs to "be organized more leanly" and reduce the number of layers in its organization in order to "move as quickly as possible," she wrote. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly," Galetti wrote in the blog post. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business." Related: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Says There's One Trait That Contributes 'an Embarrassing Amount' to Being Successful Amazon's last major rounds of layoffs occurred between late 2022 and early 2023, when the company gradually laid off 27,000 employees, another large round of job cuts. Other tech companies have also recently conducted layoffs. Meta cut 600 positions from its Superintelligence Labs AI team last week, while Microsoft laid off more than 15,000 employees in May and July. Amazon will report its third-quarter earnings on Thursday after market close. The company is the fifth most valuable in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion at the time of writing. Related: Amazon Aims to Replace 600,000 Future Hires With Robots, According to Leaked Documents

Amazon's layoffs show how AI is coming for India

Amazon's global job cuts serve as a stark warning for India. Artificial intelligence now threatens jobs, wages, and the future of white-collar work. This impacts sectors beyond entry-level programming. India's large youth population faces significant challenges. Proactive government and corporate action is crucial to navigate this technological shift. Amazon.com Inc.'s latest global layoffs should come as a singular warning to India. For policymakers dealing with the world's largest youth population, AI suddenly poses a very real risk to jobs, wages, and a white-collar future. The e-commerce and cloud services giant's elimination of 14,000 corporate positions worldwide may not have a large direct impact on its sizeable Indian workforce. The more worrying thing is the kind of occupations at risk: Generative artificial intelligence is starting to affect more than just entry-level computer programming. Outsourcing hubs like Bengaluru and Hyderabad are already feeling the pinch from AI. But Amazon's cuts may affect finance, marketing, human resources and tech employees, according to local media reports. That puts many more sectors on notice and validates a growing body of academic work. Also Read: Amazon layoffs not driven by AI but by culture, says CEO Andy Jassy After parsing nearly 200 years of data on labor markets and technological change, finance scholars at Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded that advances in natural-language processing may favor occupations that are lower-educated, lower-paid, and more male-dominated, such as construction and trucking. It would be a dramatic departure from how previous innovation affected demand for workers. As Huben Liu and his coauthors explain, until the 1980s IT revolution, most advances in automation supplanted manual effort while supporting cognitive tasks. Take, for instance, Irving Colburn's early-20th-century invention of a machine to substitute hand-blown glass in window panes. The blowers' wages fell 40%. Within one generation, mechanization drove an entire class of artisans out of business. Also Read: Amazon India layoffs- Tech major may fire 800-1,000 staff under global job cuts By contrast, the arrival of electronic calculators in the 1970s helped accountants and auditors to become more productive. It didn't replace them. The tilt toward services such as finance and health care favored women, facilitating their entry into the workforce as 20th-century innovations also eased the burden of domestic chores. Over time, these improvements went global, but the hard-won gains may now reverse. With the capital costs of implementing AI expected to become cheaper each year, cognitive tasks that don't require at least five years of specific vocational preparation will be at risk from automation, the researchers say. That includes many entry-level jobs, such as analyzing financial statements at Wall Street firms. Mechanized production of sheet glass did little to hurt women. At the cusp of automation in 1900, they held few of the 53,000 jobs in the US glass industry. Employers preferred men. (In 1900, the industry employed twice as many children under 16 as women.) But to lose out now to Lilli, McKinsey & Co.'s proprietary AI tool that's drafting client proposals and preparing slide decks? That would certainly rankle, especially since it's named after the first woman professional hired by the consulting firm in 1945. All this may come as a particularly harsh blow to the 375 million Indians who are between 10 and 24 years old. At 18.5%, youth unemployment in cities is alarmingly high. Young women's participation in the labor force is abysmally low at under 22%. Large-scale adoption of AI tools by companies will further muddy the picture. In a separate paper, London School of Economics professor Luis Garicano and his coauthor examine a realistic scenario: If AI does away with entry-level grunt work, which employer will bother to train fresh graduates? How will they rise up the career ladder to higher-wage positions? Artificial intelligence may still surprise us by creating new tasks that don't yet exist. It's also possible that young people will invest in their own AI training. But if Amazon is any indication, the technological exposure of higher-educated, better-paid, and more women-oriented occupations is indeed high. This won't be the first shock to India's labor market in modern times. Its cotton spinners and weavers, among the world's best in the early 18th century, took a large hit from the Industrial Revolution. As the economy struggles to move from lower-middle to higher-middle income, AI is threatening its biggest advantage: the youth bulge it enjoys against other countries that are rapidly aging. The right approach to AI would contain both carrots and sticks. The preponderance of Chinese large language models among the world's top 20, as highlighted by my colleague Catherine Thorbecke, makes it obvious that India isn't doing enough fundamental research. This must change. The government also needs to read the riot act to outsourcing firms. They have to halt share buybacks and invest in meaningful AI projects, not just data centers. Finally, the broader corporate sector should be given generous tax breaks for research and development. Instead of coming up with generic copies of drugs going off patent in the West, pharmaceutical companies must be encouraged to use AI to discover new molecules. The next quarter-century offers the most-populous nation a chance to get rich before it grows old. Ending up on the wrong side of technological change for the second time in 300 years won't be a good outcome -- either for India, or the world. Amazon's job cuts are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The time to act is now, before the outlook for white-collar work turns more toxic.

Profits Soar, Jobs Vanish: How AI Created A Tale Of Two Economies - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

There's something uncanny about today's job market: corporate profits are surging, tech companies are delivering blockbuster earnings, and yet tens of thousands of high-skilled jobs are quietly disappearing -- replaced not by cheaper labor, but rather artificial intelligence. Just last week, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced 30,000 layoffs, explicitly citing artificial intelligence as the main driver. Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) and Salesforce Inc. (NASDAQ:CRM) are following suit. These cuts, however, don't come with the usual backdrop of slowing revenue or shrinking margins. Quite the opposite -- tech giants are enjoying robust earnings growth, making the timing of these layoffs all the more striking. Read also: Amazon To Cut Up To 30,000 Jobs, Largest Layoff In Company History Is AI Fueling A Productivity Miracle -- Or A Displacement Shock? Take a look at the chart below, which tracks the S&P 500 alongside private-sector job openings. For most of the past 25 years, these two metrics moved closely together -- more job openings typically meant stronger economic confidence, and the stock market reflected that optimism. But that historical relationship began to break down after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Since then, a striking divergence has emerged. Private job openings have fallen sharply -- from a peak of 11 million in 2021 to just 6.46 million by mid-2025 -- signaling weakening labor demand. Yet the stock market has continued climbing to record highs, fueled by robust earnings growth and rising productivity, particularly in tech. It's become the latest chapter in the Wall Street versus Main Street divide -- profits and valuations are soaring, even as job creation lags far behind. According to Chen Zhao, chief global strategist at Alpine Macro, this decoupling of profits from payrolls isn't just a quirk of the tech sector anymore. "The combination of booming corporate profits and meager job growth is no longer confined to the tech sector -- it has quickly become an economy-wide phenomenon," Zhao said in a report on Monday. Since 2020, U.S. labor productivity has accelerated to levels more than twice the average of the 2010s, Alpine Macro reports. While some of that growth could stem from post-pandemic restructuring or leaner operations, Zhao highlights there's a deeper explanation. As machines and algorithms take on more of the cognitive and repetitive workload once handled by humans, companies can do more with less. That, in turn, boosts earnings per employee -- even as the number of employees shrinks. Where Did The Workers Go? Despite resilient GDP growth, total private-sector employment remains 5% below its pre-pandemic trend. Zhao argues that this points to a structural, not cyclical, shift in the U.S. labor market. A shrinking workforce explains some of that gap. The labor force participation rate has never fully recovered from the COVID-19 shock and has fallen further since early 2024. Mass retirements among baby boomers are also a big factor. The Trump administration's stepped-up deportation campaign adds more pressure: with a target of 3,000 undocumented immigrants deported per day, the U.S. could lose 1.5 million workers -- about 1% of its labor force -- within a year. With slower labor force growth, the U.S. now requires far fewer new jobs to maintain its unemployment rate. That's one reason why the jobless rate has only ticked up to 4.3%, despite weakening job creation. Strong Profits, Low Inflation -- Too Good to Last? Here's where it gets tricky for the Federal Reserve. Rising productivity allows companies to absorb higher costs without raising prices, which is inherently disinflationary. With wages rising 3.9% and productivity at 2%, implied inflation barely hits 2%. If productivity jumps to 2.5%, Alpine Macro estimates core inflation could fall below the Fed's target -- particularly as rent inflation, a key component of core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), drops sharply. Zhao said investors should brace for the Fed to stay cautious on rate cuts. "A jobless expansion allows a temporary decoupling between a softening labor market and solid GDP growth," he said, adding that strong output with weak hiring could delay further easing. A Bull Market Built On Efficiency This time around, the stock rally isn't built on hype alone. It's being fueled by real profit growth, something Alpine Macro contrasts with the late-1990s tech boom, when equity valuations surged ahead of earnings. Still, Zhao warns that the Fed's path forward remains complicated. While inflation may fall over time, the near-term picture -- with core inflation still close to 3% -- limits the central bank's maneuvering room. For now, Alpine Macro is betting that the Fed will deliver fewer near-term cuts than markets expect. In the long run, however, the picture may flip. If inflation falls below target and job growth remains sluggish, the Fed could be forced into more aggressive easing. "Ultimately," Zhao said, "a jobless boom means the Fed will be less dovish now -- but more dovish later." Read now: Wall Street Enters Its Strongest Month: These 7 Stocks Often Crush It Photo: Shutterstock AMZNAmazon.com Inc$245.520.53%OverviewCRMSalesforce Inc$260.16-0.10%METAMeta Platforms Inc$656.361.24%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Amazon Confirms 14,000 Layoffs; Says 'AI' Innovation Reason For 'Reducing Roles'

'This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet. It's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,' says Amazon executive Beth Galetti concerning the layoff of 14,000 corporate employees. Amazon confirmed that it will lay off 14,000 corporate employees as part of major organizational changes across the tech giant, with employees learning Tuesday if they will be let go. "There will be communications from leaders to those teams and individuals today, but we also wanted to share the broader context about what's happening and why," said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, in a letter to employees Tuesday. "While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles," she said. Regarding why the $168 billion Seattle-based tech giant is "reducing roles" when the company is performing well, Galetti pointed to AI innovation. "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet," she said. "It's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before [in existing market segments and new ones]," said Galetti. [Related: Amazon's Outage Root Cause, $581M Loss Potential And 'Apology:' 5 AWS Outage Takeaways] "We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she said. Amazon, which includes its AWS cloud business, said many employees over the last year have "put significant effort into that work of strengthening your organizations by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy," Galetti said. Because of this effort, Amazon is seeing great results by being able to have teams move faster, she said. "The reductions we're sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets," said Galetti. Looking ahead to 2026, Amazon said it expects to "continue hiring in key strategic areas." However, the company said it will continue to find "additional places [where] we can remove layers, increase ownership and realize efficiency gains," said Galetti. Galetti touted Amazon's innovation and vision while discussing the layoffs. "I don't know of any other company with the breadth of Amazon, the number of exciting bold bets we're making, and all the ways we can make customers' lives better and easier around the world," said Galetti. The tech giant said it is offering most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally. Amazon said its own recruiting teams will prioritize internal candidates to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon. "For our teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we'll offer them transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits and more," said Galetti. This month, Amazon reportedly laid off up to 15 percent of its staff in its human resources division with additional layoffs in other divisions. In a companywide letter to employees in June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company expects to "reduce" its corporate workforce due to "efficiency gains" in artificial intelligence. "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs," said Jassy in his letter to employees. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," Amazon's CEO said. Jassy said the company plans to spend $100 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 in a move to expand its AI and cloud data centers.

Amazon layoffs 2025: Why 14,000 jobs are being cut, which Amazon divisions are most affected, and how Amazon stock is reacting

Amazon layoffs 2025 have sent shockwaves across the corporate world. The tech giant confirmed it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs this year, equal to about 4% of its 350,000 white-collar workforce, as it prepares for a full-scale transition into the artificial intelligence (AI) era. The company said the move is designed to make Amazon leaner and faster while redirecting resources toward AI, automation, and cloud innovation. Executives described the layoffs as a strategic restructuring -- not a sign of slowdown, but a pivot to strengthen Amazon's competitiveness in the next wave of digital transformation. The decision comes as Amazon faces rising operating costs and slower growth in some retail segments after years of pandemic-era overexpansion. CEO Andy Jassy and Senior VP Beth Galetti said AI is driving the biggest transformation in Amazon's history, calling it "the most powerful shift since the Internet." The company said it would continue hiring for AI, cloud computing, and robotics roles, while offering priority rehiring for affected employees in these emerging divisions. Sources told Reuters that the restructuring mainly targets corporate and management roles across HR, retail, AWS, and device units like Alexa and Fire TV, which are being consolidated to cut overhead. Most warehouse and delivery workers remain unaffected. Analysts say up to 30,000 positions could ultimately be impacted as Amazon automates more of its global operations through advanced AI systems. Despite the headline layoffs, investors responded positively. Amazon stock (NASDAQ: AMZN) rose to $226.97, up slightly on Tuesday, as traders viewed the cuts as a signal of cost discipline and efficiency ahead of a major AI expansion. Wolfe Research maintained its $270 price target, citing margin improvement and long-term growth potential driven by Amazon's AI roadmap. The company's market cap now sits around $2.35 trillion, cementing its place among the top five U.S. corporations by value. Analysts say this marks the first large-scale layoff wave of the AI era. Unlike previous tech job cuts tied to financial strain, Amazon's move reflects a deeper strategic shift -- reducing middle management and repetitive corporate roles while investing billions into AI data centers, generative AI tools, and cloud infrastructure. Economists note that this transition could set a precedent for other tech majors to streamline workforces as AI accelerates decision-making and automation. For Amazon, the goal is to reallocate resources toward high-growth sectors like AWS, advertising, and AI-driven logistics. The company believes these changes will improve operating margins in 2026 and beyond. However, analysts warn that execution will be critical -- balancing AI efficiency with innovation and employee morale. Still, Amazon's leadership remains confident that these cuts will help it move faster, stay innovative, and dominate the next phase of AI-powered growth. Amazon's corporate layoffs affect roughly 4% of its corporate workforce, which totals around 350,000 employees. These cuts are not random. The company is preparing to integrate AI into many business processes, which can automate repetitive and operational tasks. Amazon describes this as part of a long-term strategy rather than a short-term cost-cutting exercise. The company emphasizes that this is not about eliminating talent but about redirecting it. The biggest blow comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Prime Video, and Twitch, with significant workforce reductions reported across these business units. According to company insiders, about 7,000 positions were cut from AWS alone, primarily in sales, marketing, and operations teams, as the company faces slowing cloud growth and tougher competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Another 3,000 roles were slashed in Prime Video and Amazon Studios, as the company rebalances its entertainment spending after years of heavy investment in original content. The cuts include several senior creative executives and marketing professionals, signaling a broader pullback in Amazon's streaming push. In addition, Amazon's Twitch division is reportedly eliminating around 500 roles, continuing a trend of downsizing that began in 2023 after the platform's restructuring under new leadership. Sources also indicate layoffs in Amazon's Devices and Alexa unit, where nearly 2,000 employees have been affected as demand for smart home devices slows globally. The latest layoffs follow CEO Andy Jassy's cost discipline drive, part of the ongoing "Fit for Future" initiative aimed at trimming underperforming areas and boosting profitability. The move brings Amazon's total job cuts since 2023 to over 37,000, making it one of the largest corporate downsizing efforts in U.S. tech history. The Amazon divisions most affected by the recent layoffs include: These cuts are part of a broader effort to reduce bureaucracy, streamline operations, and integrate AI technology more deeply into the company's workflow. The layoffs impact around 10% of the corporate workforce, aiming to flatten management layers and enhance responsiveness while preparing for increased automation through AI adoption. Overall, almost all major corporate departments are experiencing significant job cuts as part of CEO Andy Jassy's efficiency campaign and AI-driven restructuring strategy. Amazon has stated that it will provide support for employees affected by the layoffs. The company is offering a 90-day window for laid-off staff to apply for new roles internally. Here's how Amazon is supporting employees: The aim is to minimize the impact on workers while ensuring that talent is retained in areas where the company needs it most. Regarding Amazon's stock performance following the layoffs announcement, shares rose about 1.5% to $227.53, reflecting investor optimism about the company's cost-cutting strategy and its focus on efficiency and AI investments. Analysts remain optimistic about Amazon's long-term growth prospects amid these restructuring efforts. The short-term impact of the layoffs announcement on Amazon's stock price was positive. Amazon shares rose about 1.3% on the day following the layoffs announcement, closing around $227.11 initially and reaching roughly $229 in early trading. This uptick reflected investor optimism that the layoffs were part of an efficiency and cost-cutting drive, as well as a strategic push for AI adoption to improve productivity and streamline operations. Despite this short-term gain, Amazon's year-to-date stock performance remains below the broader market gains, indicating mixed longer-term investor sentiment. After the announcement of the layoffs, Wolfe Research maintained their price target for Amazon stock at $270. There is no clear indication from the current search results of other analysts updating or raising price targets specifically in response to this announcement. Wolfe Research's maintained target suggests cautious optimism reflecting the company's strategic moves around AI and cost management. The integration of AI is the main reason for the layoffs. Amazon is investing heavily in generative AI technologies to make business operations more efficient and reduce manual workloads. Key points about Amazon's AI strategy: This shift is part of a broader tech trend where companies are using AI to reduce operational costs and improve productivity. While Amazon has not listed every role that will be cut, some trends are clear. The layoffs mainly affect corporate and administrative positions that can be automated or streamlined. Employees in these roles may experience: At the same time, Amazon continues to hire in critical growth areas like AI development, cloud computing, and new technology teams. This means there are still opportunities for employees who adapt and reskill. The layoffs are part of a larger transformation strategy for Amazon. By reducing unnecessary positions and focusing on AI, the company aims to: The move also sends a signal to the market that Amazon is serious about using technology to drive long-term growth. Analysts expect that these changes could strengthen the company's position in AI and cloud markets. Amazon's decision reflects a wider trend in the tech sector. Many companies are restructuring to focus on AI while reducing traditional corporate roles. Industry insights: This shows that AI is reshaping white-collar jobs, and workers need to adapt to stay relevant. Employees affected by layoffs or considering career shifts should: By adapting to these trends, employees can secure roles in high-demand areas and reduce the risk of future layoffs.

White-collar workers should worry about this concerning trend

The U.S. labor market is in a state of flux. The number of job cuts in the public sector has been much higher than typical in 2025. Still, even private-sector industries not concerned with reducing the federal workforce are seeing major declines. About 1.6 million U.S. workers are being laid off each month this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. U.S. layoff stats 2025: * 1.6 million workers laid off each month * On pace for 19.2 million annually. * 206,101 employees laid off from 221 tech companies * Job cuts up 5.9% year over year * 21% of companies expected to lay off employees Through August, 13.8 million Americans were laid off, a 4.6% increase over the previous year. Macroeconomic factors always play a role in layoffs. But this time around, a technological issue is weighing on the labor market, and it's projected to get even worse for workers on the deeper end of the earnings pool. The AI job revolution is already hurting white-collar workers Last week, Amazon dropped a bombshell when it announced it would cut 14,000 white-collar jobs, eliminating about 10% of its corporate workforce in the process. Amazon wasn't alone. UPS has cut 14,000 managerial positions over the past 22 months. Target has said it will cut 1,800 corporate jobs. GM is cutting hundreds of jobs at its Georgia IT center. And Molson Coors eliminated 400 salaried jobs across its Americas business, representing about 9% of its white-collar workforce. Companies, especially in the tech sector, view the AI revolution as a way to reduce redundancies in their managerial ranks. "Some actually say that they think they'll do better with smaller organizations. There was a memo sent last week inside Meta where the company's AI chief actually said that by reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make decisions and that each person will be 'more load-bearing and have more scope,'" Chip Cutter, jobs reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recently said on a podcast. Mike Hoffman, CEO of growth advisory consulting firm SBI, also recently bragged that he has been able to cut his software development team by 80% in recent months, even while productivity increased. While that is good news for businesses, workers are feeling the crunch. "For employees, this is a really difficult labor market to navigate. If you're out of work and looking for a job, it's often times difficult to get people to respond to you to find one. Many big companies are not hiring right now," Cutter said. Tech companies invest heavily in AI, job cuts soon follow Tata Consultancy Services is an IT company based in India. Earlier this year, the company laid off over 12,000 middle- and senior-management personnel as it looked to "position the company as a future-ready organization." The move to shed 2% of its workforce is the largest ever by India's top private employer. Closer to home, Accenture recently announced a restructuring plan for workers unable to reskill on AI. In September, Salesforce announced the layoffs of 4,000 customer support workers, saying that AI can do 50% of the company's work. According to tech market intelligence firm UnearthInsight, as many as 500,000 white-collar software workers could be laid off over the next two to three years, and about 70% of those layoffs would impact workers with 4-12 years of experience. But some critics say these companies are simply blaming AI for the job cuts, when the real issue was overhiring during the pandemic. "I'm really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It's rather really a projection into AI in the sense of 'We can use AI to make good excuses,'" Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, told CNBC. "It's to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long-term perspective, and instead of saying 'We miscalculated this two, three years ago,' they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying, 'It's because of AI, though.'" The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 6:37 PM.

When is the next Amazon layoffs? Company confirms 14,000 job cuts as AI reshapes operations. Here's job cuts timeline and support for affected employees, AI and workforce restructuring

When is the next Amazon layoffs? Amazon confirmed that 14,000 corporate jobs will be cut in 2025 to streamline operations for AI expansion. The company plans further restructuring as it prepares for automation-driven changes, while CEO Andy Jassy emphasizes a leaner workforce and faster innovation for future growth. When is the next Amazon layoffs? Amazon has confirmed that it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs in 2025 as part of a major restructuring plan linked to artificial intelligence integration. The company said these layoffs are aimed at improving operational efficiency while focusing on AI-driven innovation. CEO Andy Jassy emphasized that Amazon will continue hiring in specific technology areas even as it reduces overall staff numbers. This move marks another step in Amazon's broader strategy to adapt its workforce to automation, digital transformation, and long-term AI growth. Amazon has announced that it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs this year as part of a larger plan to restructure its workforce in preparation for the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. The layoffs will affect corporate employees across departments as the company seeks to simplify its operations. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the update in a memo to employees that was also posted on Amazon's public blog. She explained that the company will continue hiring in select strategic areas but also expects more reductions in the coming months. Galetti said, "We expect to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains." Reuters first reported that the layoffs could reach as high as 30,000 positions before the restructuring is complete. Galetti stated that Amazon's restructuring aligns with CEO Andy Jassy's vision to make the company operate more efficiently, similar to a startup model. The focus is to ensure that Amazon remains flexible in an evolving technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence. She added that AI is the most transformative technology since the internet, enabling companies to innovate faster than ever before. To respond to these shifts, Amazon aims to be more agile, with fewer organizational layers and more ownership at every level. According to a filing with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2024, Amazon had over 350,000 corporate employees. The 14,000 job cuts represent around 4% of its corporate workforce. The layoffs will begin Tuesday, with most impacted employees given 90 days to apply for internal roles. Those who are unable to find new positions within the company will receive severance packages and other benefits. Amazon emphasized that employees will have access to resources during the transition, including career support and extended benefits to assist them in finding new opportunities within or outside the company. In a previous blog post from June, CEO Andy Jassy said that generative AI will transform how work is done at Amazon. He mentioned that while some jobs will be reduced, new types of roles will emerge as AI tools expand across business areas. "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy wrote. He also noted that AI will not only change Amazon's internal processes but will impact industries worldwide. Billions of AI agents will be integrated into different sectors, changing how people work and live. This round of layoffs follows earlier cuts in 2023, when Amazon reduced its workforce by 27,000 employees. Those cuts affected departments such as human resources, Amazon Stores, and Amazon Web Services. At that time, Jassy cited global economic pressures and rising costs as the primary reasons for downsizing. Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData, said that Amazon's decision reflects broader market challenges. He explained that global markets are tightening while operational costs continue to rise. Saunders added that Amazon's shift toward technology-driven efficiency marks a move away from human labor toward technological infrastructure. The U.S. job market has shown signs of slowing, particularly in the technology sector. Many companies are introducing AI tools that reduce the need for certain human roles. Analysts have warned that generative AI may displace workers in repetitive or process-driven jobs. However, AI experts have pointed out that while automation will change job structures, it will also create new opportunities. They emphasize that AI adoption should be balanced with policies that help workers transition into emerging roles. 1. When is the next Amazon layoffs expected to happen? Amazon has begun its layoffs this week, with 14,000 corporate positions affected. Further reductions may occur later in 2025 as AI integration continues. 2. Why is Amazon reducing its workforce? Amazon is cutting jobs to streamline operations, increase efficiency, and prepare for the wider use of artificial intelligence across its global business operations.

Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate jobs as spending on artificial intelligence accelerates

Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while cutting costs elsewhere. In June CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively sought to cut costs since becoming CEO in 2021, said that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon's corporate workforce in the next few years. Jassy said at the time that Amazon had more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure was a "small fraction" of what it plans to build. Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the company's AI plans after it announced plans to invest $10 billion building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it builds up its infrastructure to tries to keep up with other tech giants making leaps in AI. Amazon is competing with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and others. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy said the potential for growth in the company's AWS business is massive. "If you believe your mission is to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you're going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that's what we're doing. You can see that in the 1,000-plus AI applications we're building across Amazon. You can see that with our next generation of Alexa, named Alexa+," he said. Teams and individuals impacted by the job cuts will be notified on Tuesday. Most workers will be given 90 days to look for a new position internally, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, wrote in a letter to employees on Tuesday. For those who can't find a new role at the company or who opt not to look for one will be provided transitional support including severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits. Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. The cuts announced Tuesday amount to about a 4% reduction in its corporate workforce. Amazon's workforce doubled during the pandemic as millions stayed home and boosted online spending. In the following years, big tech and retail companies cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line. The cuts announced Tuesday suggests Amazon is still trying to get the size of its workforce right and it may not be over. It was the biggest culling at Amazon since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs. Those cuts came in waves, with 9,000 jobs trimmed in March of that year, and another 18,000 employees two months later. Amazon has not said if more job cuts are on the way. Yet the jobs market which has for years been an pillar in the U.S. economy, is showing signs of weakening. Layoffs have been limited, but the same can be said for hiring. Government hiring data is on hold during during the government shut down, but earlier this month a survey by payroll company ADP showed a surprising loss of 32,000 jobs losses in the private sector in September. Many retailers are pulling back on seasonal hiring this year due to uncertainty over the U.S. economy and tariffs. Amazon Inc. said this month, however, that it would hire 250,000 seasonal workers, the same as last year's holiday season. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, said in a statement that the layoffs "represent a deep cleaning of Amazon's corporate workforce." "Unlike the Target layoffs, Amazon is operating from a position of strength," he said. "The company has been producing good growth, and it still has a lot of headroom for further expansion in both the U.S. and overseas." But Saunders noted that Amazon is not immune to outside factors, as global markets tighten and underlying costs climb. "It needs to act if it wants to continue with a good bottom line performance. This is especially so given the amount of investment the company is making in areas like logistics and AI. In some ways, this is a tipping point away from human capital to technological infrastructure," he said. Amazon will post quarterly financial results on Thursday. During its most recent quarter, the company reported 17.5% growth for its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services.

Amazon to cut 30,000 corporate jobs -- 9% of worldwide office...

Amazon will slash 30,000 corporate jobs starting Tuesday, according to a report -- unleashing one of the US's biggest job bloodbaths this century as the company aggressively revamps its business with artificial intelligence. Sources told Reuters the reductions -- which amount to 9% of Amazon's global office-based workforce of 350,000 -- will begin Tuesday and could unfold over several weeks. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Seattle-based web giant's sweeping layoffs mark the biggest in a series of major contractions for the company, which has slashed tens of thousands of jobs since CEO Andy Jassy took over from the company's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos in 2021. In 2022 and 2023, Jassy cut a total of 27,000 jobs, Reuters reported. Those cuts targeted Amazon Web Services, its devices group and entertainment units including Prime Video and Twitch. Reuters reported that this week's layoffs could reach across multiple departments, among them human resources -- known internally as the People Experience and Technology group -- as well as devices, services and operations. Managers in affected areas were instructed Monday to complete training sessions on how to brief employees once email notifications start going out Tuesday morning, sources told Reuters. The latest reductions come as Amazon doubles down on artificial intelligence and robotics -- technologies Jassy has described as central to the company's next phase of growth. In a companywide email in June, Jassy warned employees to embrace automation or risk being left behind, writing that those who "become conversant in AI" would be best positioned to "help us reinvent the company." He also acknowledged that Amazon expected "efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company" that would reduce the corporate workforce. Earlier this month, Fortune reported that Amazon was preparing to cut up to 15% of its People eXperience and Technology division, known internally as PXT -- a 10,000-person unit that includes recruiting and HR tech teams. Those layoffs are believed to be part of the new 30,000 total. The scale of the latest cuts positions Amazon among the largest corporate downsizers of 2025, alongside Meta and Google parent Alphabet, which have also trimmed staff as AI investments reshape the tech industry. The company has been aggressively reining in costs while committing more than $100 billion in capital spending this year to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure. Amazon's push to automate its operations has intensified in recent months. Internal strategy documents reviewed by The New York Times showed the company aims to replace more than 500,000 jobs with robots and automate 75% of its fulfillment operations by 2033. Executives have told the board that automation could allow Amazon to avoid hiring hundreds of thousands of additional workers in the US while doubling sales volume. Amazon said at the time that the internal documents did not represent its official hiring strategy and that the company would continue to create new jobs in logistics and technology. Jassy's cost-cutting measures have included mandatory return-to-office policies, stricter performance management and an annual process known internally as "unregretted attrition," which encourages managers to push out underperformers. The company's corporate workforce ballooned during the pandemic as online shopping surged. Since then, Jassy has sought to reverse that expansion while redirecting resources toward more profitable segments like AWS and advertising. Amazon's stock has risen about 20% over the past year but remains volatile amid investor scrutiny over its long-term profitability. While corporate layoffs loom, Amazon said it still plans to hire 250,000 seasonal warehouse and delivery workers for the holiday rush -- most of them temporary roles. Jassy has been pursuing a broad campaign to streamline Amazon's management structure, arguing that the company had become weighed down by unnecessary layers of oversight. Earlier this year, he said an anonymous feedback channel created to flag inefficiencies had drawn about 1,500 submissions and prompted more than 450 process changes.

Amazon layoff: Company to fire up to 30,000 corporate jobs in its biggest layoff since 2022 amid AI overhaul and bureaucracy crackdown

Amazon is preparing to lay off up to 30,000 corporate employees, aiming to streamline operations and address pandemic-era overhiring. This significant reduction, impacting departments like HR and devices, is part of CEO Andy Jassy's strategy to cut bureaucracy and leverage AI for automation. The exact number of affected roles may fluctuate as financial priorities evolve. Amazon is set to eliminate as many as 30,000 corporate positions, as part of a strategic move to streamline operations and address overhiring during the pandemic's peak demand. This significant reduction represents approximately 10 percent of Amazon's 350,000 corporate employees, though it constitutes a small fraction of the company's total workforce of 1.55 million. The layoffs are expected to affect various departments, including People Experience and Technology (HR), devices and services, and operations. Managers of impacted teams underwent training on Monday to prepare for notifying affected employees, who will receive email notifications starting Tuesday morning. CEO Andy Jassy has been actively working to reduce what he describes as an excess of bureaucracy within the company. This initiative includes cutting managerial roles and leveraging artificial intelligence to automate routine tasks. Jassy has previously mentioned that the increased use of AI tools would likely lead to further job cuts, particularly in automating repetitive and routine tasks. Earlier this year, he set up an anonymous complaint line to flag inefficiencies, which has generated around 1,500 responses and led to more than 450 process changes. The scope of this round of job cuts remains unclear, and the number may change over time as Amazon's financial priorities shift. Earlier reports indicated that the human resources division could face a reduction of approximately 15 percent. According to CNBC website, despite the impending layoffs, Amazon's stock saw a 1.2 percent increase, closing at $226.80. The company is scheduled to report its third-quarter earnings on Thursday./

Big tech layoff mantra 2025: Less employees, more money for AI bets

Layoffs justify record-breaking data center investments across Amazon, Meta, and more Beyond glittering product launches, a pattern has emerged in US-based big tech companies for 2025. For all the talk about innovation and efficiency, the real story this year has been one of subtraction. Tens of thousands of human jobs have vanished from balance sheets. And in their place, billions of dollars have quietly been put aside for AI investment. Take Amazon. The company recently confirmed plans to cut "approximately 14,000 roles," saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by AI. Beth Galetti, senior vice president at Amazon, told staff the move would make the company "even stronger" by shifting resources "to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs." In a slight contrast, Microsoft insists that efficiency gains from AI were "not a predominant factor" in its 15,000 layoffs. "The notion that AI productivity boosts have somehow already led to this, I don't think that's the story in this instance," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and president, earlier in July 2025. Yet in the same breath, Smith acknowledged that surging capital expenditure - $80 billion in its last fiscal year - has "created pressure to rein in operating costs, which in the tech sector are more about the number of employees than anything else." Also read: Big tech layoffs amidst top AI talent hunt: Tech job market gone crazy? At Google, the numbers are starker. The company has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams, as CEO Sundar Pichai pushes the company "to be more efficient as we scale up so we don't solve everything with headcount." It underscores quite prominently that Google's relentless march to stay competitive with AI-first rivals like OpenAI isn't just about speed - it's about streamlining the human factor. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has called the 24,000 job losses - about 22% of its workforce - part of a strategy "to right-size the company to align with current demand trends and improve efficiency." The pivot, he insists, is toward AI chips and infrastructure, with "no blank checks" in spending. The company has paused several factory projects, channeling resources into AI and high-performance computing instead. Then there's Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" has become an era unto itself. Meta announced 3,600 job cuts, roughly 5% of its global workforce, while nearly doubling AI-related spending this year. Zuckerberg calls it "performance-based," the company's way of raising the bar. Meta's AI "superclusters" are under construction, as it prepares for what he calls "the era of personal superintelligence." Across the board, big tech's logic couldn't be more similar. AI is expensive, and people are expendable. Training large language models and building datacenters isn't a side project anymore - it's the new industrial revolution, complete with its own human displacement narrative. Big tech's capital spending has exploded into a kind of arms race in steel, silicon, and power all through 2025. Amazon is pouring tens of billions into AI datacenters this year alone, including $11 billion in Indiana and $10 billion in North Carolina, while Meta's $65 billion infrastructure blitz will house 1.3 million NVIDIA GPUs in facilities with the power draw of two nuclear plants. Google's $15 billion AI hub in Vishakhapatnam in India is part of an $85 billion global outlay, and Microsoft's $80 billion push through 2028 aims to double its datacenter footprint. Intel, meanwhile, is retooling its factories to serve this same demand. It's tempting to see this as simple economic calculus, where big tech companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars (some even trillions) are trading salaries for more servers, and office cubicles for enhanced cooling towers. Thanks to 2025's reality check, the tech industry that once sold us dreams of empowerment now measures progress in megawatts and GPUs. In a world where the cloud keeps expanding while payrolls shrink, AI's biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that own the land, the power, and the silicon.