Amazon announced Tuesday that it plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, marking one of the biggest rounds of layoffs in the company’s history.
Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, announced the cuts in a blog post and said the reductions are a continuation of CEO Andy Jassy’s drive to operate the company “like the world’s largest startup.”
Galetti said that despite the company performing well, it is cutting jobs as a result of AI rapidly changing the world.
“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),” Galetti wrote.
She added that Amazon needs to be leaner and have fewer layers of management in order to move faster, noting that it is reorganizing resources to invest in its biggest bets while continuing to hire in other areas.
The latest move is part of Jassy’s effort to create a leaner and more disciplined company. In recent years, Amazon cut management layers, slashed bureaucracy, tightened costs, overhauled performance and pay systems, and ordered most corporate employees back to the office five days a week.
The changes really started after the pandemic, when Amazon’s growth slowed. The company moved to rein in costs by axing unprofitable projects and cutting a bloated workforce.
Jassy said in June that AI-driven efficiency gains would shrink Amazon’s workforce. Earlier this year, the company froze the hiring budget in its massive retail division, and in July, its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services, also faced layoffs.
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