Topline
Amazon announced plans to lay off around 16,000 corporate employees early on Wednesday, in an expansion of its restructuring efforts, which began last year when the company laid off 14,000 workers after its CEO flagged that expanded adoption of artificial intelligence would lead to a shrinking of the tech giant’s workforce.
The latest round of terminations come after Amazon laid of 14,000 workers in October last year.
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Key Facts
The job cuts announcement was made in a blog post by Amazon’s Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology.
The cuts will impact 16,000 workers and Amazon was offering most of its U.S.-based employees “90 days to look for a new role internally,” the blog post said.
Staffers who are unable to find another role and those “who choose not to look for one,” will be offered “severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits.”
Galetti wrote that the company was “working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
She also noted that Amazon will “continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” without mentioning specifics.
What Did Amazon Ceo Jassy Say About Ai Impacting Jobs At The Company?
In a blog post addressing the company’s employees last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy noted that the e-commerce giants increasing adoption of AI will impact jobs. “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,” he said.
Key Background
This the second round of major layoffs undertaken by Amazon in the past few months. In late October last year, the company announced it was cutting 14,000 jobs. At the time, Galetti cited a note by Jassy about wanting Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup.” Galetti’s blog post also mentioned the impact of artificial intelligence, noting: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet…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.” At the time Reuters reported that the company’s plan was to cut 30,000 jobs in total, representing around 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce. Wednesday’s announcement brings the total cuts up to 30,000. The layoffs comes at a time when Amazon, like several other tech giants, is pouring money into artificial intelligence. Last year the company said it would spend $125 billion on building out new data centers and other capital expenses—a number which is expected to rise again this year.