Amazon announced plans to cut about 16,000 corporate employees, ratcheting up efforts to streamline bureaucracy amid rising competition over artificial intelligence.
The company will offer US-based employees 90 days to search for a new role internally, as well as severance and other transition support, Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said Wednesday in a blog post.
Amazon has more than 6,000 staff in Ireland.
“We’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” Galetti said.
The job cuts arrive a few months after the company announced it was excising 14,000 roles. Combined, the total number of terminations echoes the rolling lay-offs Amazon instituted in late 2022 and early 2023 that ultimately snared about 27,000 people.
Chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly said he’s determined to cut management layers and ease bureaucracy that began to concern executives after a pandemic-era hiring binge. Last year, he also warned employees that AI will shrink the workforce as Amazon automates more of its operations.
While the company employed a total of about 1.57 million people as of September 30, most of them work in warehouses. The corporate workforce comprises about 350,000 personnel, meaning the latest cuts represent about 4.6 per cent of that headcount.
Earlier, employees who had been anticipating lay-offs received a meeting invite and email from a top executive that was sent prematurely.
The email from Amazon senior vice-president Colleen Aubrey scheduled a meeting for Wednesday morning that has since been cancelled, titled “Project Dawn.” The email said “impacted colleagues” based in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had been notified, and referred to a separate message from Amazon’s human resources chief Beth Galetti that does not appear to have been sent.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” the email from Aubrey stated. “The decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the email.
The email quickly spread on internal message boards and social media sites like Reddit, where Amazon employees are sharing any hints they can glean about the scope of lay-offs. Amazon initiated a big round of job cuts in October, removing 14,000 corporate roles and gutting its video games division. At the time, Amazon signalled that more cuts could come in 2026 as it found “additional places we can remove layers.” – Bloomberg