Amazon fires 14,000 corporate employees, massive job cuts

Amazon is laying off nearly 14,000 corporate employees, company announced blog post On Tuesday. It marks one of biggest job cuts In the corporate history of the company.

According to the post, Amazon is offering several support measures and severance packages to corporate employees affected by the layoffs. Most employees will have 90 days to find new roles within Amazon, during which their pay and benefits will continue. Those who do not secure another position internally during this notice period will receive transitional assistance, including severance pay and health insurance benefits.

The layoffs are part of an ongoing effort to streamline the bureaucracy and redirect resources toward high-growth areas, particularly AI initiatives. Amazon is making significant investments in AI infrastructure, with capital expenditures anticipated over $120 billion For the year, up nearly 50% from last year.

Amazon of the world second largest private employer, about 1.5 million people Working for the company, mostly in warehouse roles. Of its entire global workforce, approximately 350,000 are corporate employees; This means that the recent plan to cut 14,000 corporate jobs affects about 4% of Amazon’s corporate workforce.

Connected: Amazon unveils AI smart glasses for its drivers – here’s what they actually do

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned in June that AI would force the company to reduce its workforce. In a memo to employees, Jassy wrote that Amazon “will need fewer people to do some of the work it is doing today, and more people to do other types of work.”

He wrote that he expects Amazon to reduce its total corporate headcount in the next few years due to AI, and that employees should learn to use AI tools and accomplish more with fewer team members.

Amazon is carrying out layoffs to make the company leaner and less bureaucratic, even though the e-commerce giant is in good financial shape. according to this second quarter earnings reportReleased on July 31, Amazon achieved net profit of $18.2 billion in the second quarter of the year, an increase of 35% compared with the same period last year. This performance was accompanied by revenues of $167.7 billion, an increase of 13% year-over-year, and operating income of $19.2 billion, an increase of 31% from Q2 2024.

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, explains why the company is reducing roles despite its solid performance. According to Galetti, AI enables Amazon to innovate more quickly. Amazon needs to reduce the number of layers in its organization to “organize more finely” and “move as quickly as possible,” he wrote.

“We need to remember that the world is changing rapidly,” Galetti wrote in the blog post. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we have seen since the Internet, and it is enabling companies to innovate faster (in existing market segments and into entirely new areas) than ever before. We are convinced that we need to be more streamlined, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move forward as quickly as possible for our customers and the business.”

Connected: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says there’s one quality that contributes an ’embarrassing amount’ to being successful

The last major round of layoffs at Amazon occurred between late 2022 and early 2023, when the company gradually phased out layoffs. 27,000 employeesAnother big round of job cuts.

Other tech companies have also made layoffs recently. Meta cut 600 positions from its Superintelligence Labs AI team last week, while Microsoft laid off more than 15,000 employees in May and July.

Amazon will report its third-quarter earnings after markets close on Thursday. the company is fifth most valuable in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion at the time of writing.

Connected: Amazon aims to replace 600,000 jobs with robots in the future, according to leaked documents

Amazon is laying off nearly 14,000 corporate employees, company announced blog post On Tuesday. It marks one of biggest job cuts In the corporate history of the company.

According to the post, Amazon is offering several support measures and severance packages to corporate employees affected by the layoffs. Most employees will have 90 days to find new roles within Amazon, during which their pay and benefits will continue. Those who do not secure another position internally during this notice period will receive transitional assistance, including severance pay and health insurance benefits.