Amazon’s Biggest Layoffs Yet Signal an AI-Powered Overhaul
The company is preparing to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, roughly 10% of its white collar staff, in what would be the largest reduction in its three decade history.
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Amazon is preparing to eliminate up to 30,000 corporate roles starting Tuesday, 28 October, in what would be its biggest round of layoffs on record, The Wall Street Journal reported first, citing people familiar with the plans.
The cuts would affect close to 10% of the company’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees. That still represents a small slice of Amazon’s total global headcount of about 1.5 million workers, most of whom are in warehouses and delivery.
Amazon has not publicly commented.
Notifications to affected employees are being sent by email beginning Tuesday morning, and managers were briefed and trained on how to conduct those conversations in advance, CNBC reported, citing an internal memo.
The reductions are broad. Human resources, including the People eXperience and Technology organization, is expected to see cuts of as much as 15%. Other affected groups include operations, devices and services, advertising and Amazon Web Services, the cloud division that is still Amazon’s profit engine.
For Amazon, this marks the end of an era. Since 2022, it has already cut more than 27,000 jobs, including in its devices, books, and services teams. Now, the scale is much bigger.
For years, Amazon has been known for growing nonstop, adding people, projects, and ideas at a dizzying pace. Now, it’s doing the opposite.
Amazon’s latest job cuts are the clearest sign yet of how CEO Andy Jassy wants to reshape the retail giant after the pandemic expansion years.
Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021, has told employees repeatedly that Amazon needs to become “leaner” and “more efficient,” and he has spent much of the past two years collapsing management layers, forcing a stricter return to office and using attrition to thin teams before resorting to mass cuts.
The new plan accelerates that shift by directly removing tens of thousands of corporate roles at once.
AI is central to the restructuring story. In June, Jassy told staff that advances in generative AI and AI agents would change the shape of Amazon’s white collar workforce, saying the company expects “efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” and that those gains will “reduce our total corporate workforce.”
He also told employees that those who learn to work with AI and help Amazon “reinvent the company” will be best placed in the new structure. Internally, Amazon is already building and deploying more than 1,000 AI systems and services, and Jassy has framed AI as both an automation tool and a growth bet.
The effect is that Amazon is shrinking the number of people doing coordination, compliance and routine program management while prioritizing people who can design, ship and govern AI products.
The layoffs fit into a larger carnage through the techscape which is not restructured to household names. As companies adopt AI, they’re also cutting jobs. According to Layoffs.fyi, over 200 tech firms have let go of about 130,000 workers so far this year. Microsoft has cut 15,000 jobs, Meta 600 in its AI division, Google 100 in its cloud team, and Intel leads the list with 22,000 cuts. Each company says it’s trying to become more efficient by using AI.
