Amazon is set to axe tens of thousands of corporate workers, with the firm reportedly aiming to reverse its Covid-era hiring spree and warning executives that AI could soon take their jobs.

While early reports indicated that the company might look to cut up to 30,000 employees (almost 10% of its corporate workforce), in a message to staff today (28 Oct) Amazon’s senior VP of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti, confirmed only 14,000 roles would be lost.

Galetti wrote that despite some success in reducing bureaucracy and removing organisational layers, further changes were needed in light of the changes brought by AI.

“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” said Galetti.

“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.”

While most impacted employees will be given 90 days to look for a new role internally, Galetti said those leaving would be offered severance pay, and the continuation of some benefits, however the VP did not specify which areas of the business would be impacted.

The plans, first reported by Reuters and the WSJ, are thought to impact a variety of departments, including HR, services, operations, and Amazon Web Services, with staff and managers braced for the fallout. 

The tech firm is shedding roles added during its pandemic recruitment drive, when the company took on 500,000 employees in a single year to meet unprecedented e-commerce demand, hitting a peak of 1.61 million employees before beginning to right-size.

That programme of reduction has already seen corporate employees targeted in a wave of cuts over the last few years, with Amazon eliminating more than 27,000 roles in multiple divisions such as devices, communications and podcasting while it looked to stabilise operations post-pandemic.

The massive surge in AI hasn’t helped the plight of Amazon workers, either. In a message to staff this summer, CEO Andy Jassy extolled the virtues of AI for the company’s bottom line, saying that the firm was ‘investing quite expansively’ in the technology, an investment that would impact staffing needs.

“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,” wrote Jassy. 

“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.” 

Recommended reading

• Edinburgh Games Developers Launch Legal Action Over Layoffs
• Match to Layoff 13% of Workers As Paid Users Drop
  
• Big Tech Boasts Strong Talent Retention Despite Layoffs

Last year, the company also issued a return-to-office mandate effective January 2025 that required employees to be on site for five days a week, a move that garnered fierce criticism from staff but one that Jassy said would “strengthen our culture” by fostering more connection between teams.  

While Amazon had hoped the RTO mandate would see enough staff choose the door, according to Reuters, the plans haven’t resulted in enough voluntary exits, with this being cited as another factor behind the mass layoffs.

Savings from the job cuts will ultimately help the tech giant, once the world’s largest firm across a variety of measures, stay in line with its rivals as it looks to publish third-quarter earnings later in the week. 

Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS, the company’s most profitable division, has already slipped behind Microsoft and Google in cloud sales this year, a gap that could widen after last week’s AWS blackout, which disrupted many of the world’s most popular websites.