Amazon has laid off approximately 14,000 of its corporate employees —a massive reduction the company directly attributes to the rise of artificial intelligence. While Amazon has had a series of smaller layoffs over the past few years, this is a major cut that signals a significant shift in the company’s strategy.
The layoffs, which took place on Monday, reportedly hit a wide range of departments, including video games, logistics, payments, and even the company’s powerful cloud-computing division.
In an announcement to employees, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s head of people experience and technology, explained the reasoning behind the cuts. She said that while the company is “performing well,” the world is “changing quickly.”
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Amazon believes that AI is changing the game, and it’s reorganizing its entire company to keep up. The layoffs are a stark and brutal example of how the AI revolution is not just about creating new technologies, but also about fundamentally changing the way companies operate and the kinds of jobs they need.
