Amazon has announced an approximately 14,000 person reduction in its corporate workforce. The news follows an earlier report from Reuters that up to 30,000 people could be let go. However, the exact number of layoffs is unclear, with the 14,000 figure being cushioned by planned hirings.
Engadget has reached out to Amazon for exact layoff numbers, but Bloomberg reports that impacted jobs are within teams such as video games, logistics, payments and cloud-computing.
The impetus for this reduction is, of course, AI. In the announcement, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, states that Amazon is “performing well” but “that the world is changing quickly.”
Galetti continues: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convicted 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 has executed a series of smaller scale layoffs regularly over the past few years. These layoffs have hit a range of departments, including Prime Video, Amazon Web Services and newly unionized warehouse workers.
