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Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs — the second round of mass layoffs for the e-commerce company in three months as it reduces a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.
Beth Galetti, a senior vice-president at Amazon, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur. When reached by CBC News, a spokesperson did not specify how many employees in Canada would be impacted by the layoffs.
The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.
She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.
“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Galetti said.
On Tuesday, Amazon mistakenly sent an email appearing to refer to the layoff plan as “Project Dawn” to some Amazon Web Services staff, unsettling thousands of workers.
The email, signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice-president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed that they lost their jobs.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”
On Tuesday, Amazon also cut jobs in its Fresh grocery and Go market divisions as it plans to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some of them to Whole Foods stores. It did not disclose the number of affected employees.
Amazon announced it’s cutting 14,000 corporate jobs while touting the benefits of artificial intelligence as the most transformative technology since the internet. The retail giant is the latest company to shed positions while investing big in AI.
AI ‘should change’ approach to work, CEO said
Galetti, wrote in an October blog post that with the rise of artificial intelligence, the company would need to be organized “more leanly” to adapt as quickly as possible. She indicated that more job cuts were likely in the future.
Wednesday’s announcement alluded to Galetti’s previous post, but it did not mention artificial intelligence directly.
It’s unclear whether the layoffs have anything to do with AI, said Albert Squiers, managing director of technology and product at recruiting firm Fuel Talent in Seattle, Wash. But the technology likely factored into the decision in more ways than one, he noted.
With more tech firms integrating AI into their work, “engineers and product managers and team members are seeing efficiency gains that [are] allowing them to accomplish more with less resources,” said Squiers.
“But at the same time the big tech companies, including Amazon, are spending tens of billions of dollars heavily investing in data centres and [semiconductor chips] and all the processing power that needs to be able to fund that,” he added.
Back in June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote to employees that the company’s existing generative AI products and services were a “small fraction” of what it would ultimately build.
“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,” he wrote, adding that this could lead to a smaller corporate workforce.