Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted in June that the major online retailer and technology company would be slashing staff as it invests in AI, and now it looks like those plans are going forward. In a Tuesday blog post, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, announced that the company would reduce its workforce by 14,000 jobs.
Galetti said the reductions at the second-largest employer in the nation are aimed at “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.”
“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” she said. “Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” Galetti added, referencing developments in AI.
She also mentioned a September 2024 blog post from Jassy that said he wanted Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup.” Jassy said that entailed “a passion for constantly inventing for customers,” as well as “strong urgency,” “high ownership,” “fast decision-making,” “scrappiness and frugality,” “deeply-connected collaboration,” and “a shared commitment to each other.”
“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers,” Jassy said back in 2024. “In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.).”
Along these lines, he said that Amazon’s senior leadership team was asked to increase “the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%,” by the end of the first quarter of this year. Jassy argued that “having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.”
“Many of you have put significant effort into that work of strengthening your organizations by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy,” Galetti said in her Tuesday post. She added that there are “many Amazonians feeling more ownership.”
Though Galetti said Amazon plans to cut its workforce by approximately 14,000 roles, she also said that it is offering most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally, with recruiting teams prioritizing internal candidates. For those not selected for new roles inside the company, Galetti said Amazon will provide “transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more.”
“Looking ahead to 2026, as Andy talked about earlier this year, we expect to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains,” Galetti added.
This week, we also reported on staff cuts at UPS linked to its decision to cut down on orders from Amazon, which made up more of their volume than their revenue. Reuters also reported Tuesday that Amazon could be targeting 30,000 for cuts. Last week, a The New York Times report indicated that Amazon was planning to avoid filling more than 160,000 jobs with actual human employees as it increased its investment into AI. Per CNBC, the company has committed to invest $118 billion in AI development and cloud infrastructure this year.
Other tech companies have also been slashing staff, CNBC noted. Meta laid off about 600 staffers in its AI unit just last week “in an effort to reduce layers and operate more nimbly,” the outlet said. Microsoft has also cut 15,000 staffers this year and CEO Satya Nadella told staffers they must “reimagine our mission for a new era” of AI. Google also moved to eliminate 35% of managers overseeing small teams.
“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),” said Galetti’s post. “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.”
CNBC said these recent layoffs at Amazon are “are expected to ultimately be the largest corporate job cuts in Amazon’s history,” following layoffs of 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023. It added that the cuts are expected to impact every part of the company. With an estimated 350,000 corporate and tech employees, 14,000 job cuts represent about 4% of that segment of the company’s workforce.