{"id":348289,"date":"2025-11-01T15:56:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/348289\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T15:56:30","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:56:30","slug":"ceo-andy-jassy-says-amazons-14000-layoffs-werent-about-cutting-costs-or-ai-taking-jobs-its-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/348289\/","title":{"rendered":"CEO Andy Jassy says Amazon\u2019s 14,000 layoffs weren\u2019t about cutting costs or AI taking jobs: ‘It’s culture’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon\u2019s CEO has finally spoken up about the company\u2019s 14,000 layoffs<\/a> earlier this week, and he claims the motive was not at all financial.<\/p>\n

Speaking during the company\u2019s quarterly earnings call Thursday, CEO Andy Jassy said laying off those employees was about a mismatched cultural fit\u2014and nothing else.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it\u2019s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,\u201d he said about the job cuts. \u201cIt\u2019s culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

The job cuts this week, which mostly affected middle managers, follow a June memo<\/a> in which Jassy said Amazon will need fewer employees thanks to the \u201cefficiency gains\u201d brought on by AI. In a separate memo<\/a> announcing this week\u2019s layoffs, Amazon\u2019s senior vice president of people said the layoffs were about adapting to \u201ctransformative technology.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jassy also mentioned Amazon\u2019s business has grown over the past years. The company has about 1.55 million total<\/a> employees, with 350,000 corporate employees alone. As of December 2019, prior to the pandemic, the company had 798,000 total employees, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you\u2019re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This type of growth can lead to consequences, Jassy added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions, the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment. <\/p>\n

Amazon joins other companies such as Salesforce<\/a>, Target<\/a>, and Paramount<\/a> who have together laid off thousands of workers in the past few months. Several large companies have cited AI as a reason for hiring pauses or layoffs recently, said<\/a> Fed Chairman Jerome Powell this week, adding that the Fed is \u201cwatching that very carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, a study of Goldman Sachs investment bankers this week found<\/a> only 11% of their corporate clients were actively laying people off due to AI. In contrast, about a third of companies in the technology, media, and telecommunications category are reducing headcount because of AI.<\/p>\n

During the quarterly earnings call, Jassy seemed to echo the sentiment, saying the \u201ctechnological transformation\u201d currently underway means companies need to be nimble and adaptable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to be lean, it\u2019s important to be flat, and it\u2019s important to move fast,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019re going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon\u2019s CEO has finally spoken up about the company\u2019s 14,000 layoffs earlier this week, and he claims the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":348290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2431,69902,64,15876,242,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-348289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-andy-jassy","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-layoffs","12":"tag-tech","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115475263305791064","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}