Amazon announced plans to cut about 14,000 corporate positions, citing a decision to reallocate resources toward investment in artificial intelligence.
Beth Galetti, the company’s senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, said in a corporate blog post that the measures are aimed at “reducing bureaucracy, simplifying structure, and focusing efforts on key priorities.”
According to Galetti, “this generation of artificial intelligence represents the most transformative technological shift since the Internet—it allows companies to innovate faster than ever before, both in existing sectors and in entirely new ones.” She added that Amazon must be “organized more leanly, with fewer management layers and greater autonomy,” to accelerate work and improve efficiency.
As of July, Amazon employed around 1.55 million people, about 350,000 of whom hold corporate positions, with the rest working in warehouses and logistics. The new round of layoffs will therefore affect roughly 4 percent of office staff.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had hinted at such steps back in June, saying the company expected to reduce its corporate workforce in the coming years as efficiency improves through the adoption of AI. “As generative AI and intelligent agents become more widespread, the very nature of work will change,” he noted. “We’ll need fewer people for some existing tasks—and more for entirely new areas.”