Amazon is Eliminating 14,000 Jobs Amid AI Push

Amazon announced this morning that it was eliminating approximately 14,000 corporate jobs as part of organizational changes to “be organized more leanly.” A previous report from Reuters suggested that the company could lay off up to 30,000 employees, but Amazon said today that it will reduce its workforce in some areas and hire in others.

As you may remember, Amazon previously laid off about 27,000 employees at the beginning of 2023. In June of this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a message to employees that the rise of generative and agentic AI would significantly impact how the company operates. “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,” the exec said at the time.

Today, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, confirmed the disruptive effect of AI technology on the tech industry. “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,” the exec said.

As Bloomberg pointed out today, these 14,000 job cuts represent around 4% of the company’s 350,000 corporate jobs. Amazon said in June that it had approximately 1.55 million employees around the world, with most of them working in warehouses.

Galetti said today that Amazon will “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.” The company will give most employees affected by the layoffs 90 days to look for a new role internally. The retail giant will also offer severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more to everyone else.