Amazon is shedding corporate jobs as its embrace of artificial intelligence reduces its need for humans.
The company plans on “an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles,” Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon Beth Galetti posted.
“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results,” she wrote.
“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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.”
Amazon needs to be “more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” she explained, noting that most employees to be shown the door will get 90 days to find another job before they are cut loose, as well as what she called “transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more.”
The cuts had been foreshadowed in a June communication from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in which he said AI “should change the way our work is done.”
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
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The cuts will be the most since 2022, when Amazon eliminated about 27,000 jobs, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal quoted sources it did not name as saying Amazon was still trimming jobs added during the pandemic to deal with the spike in online shopping.
The cuts come amid reductions at other companies, some linked to AI, according to NBC.
Paramount Skydance is in the process of cutting between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs. Salesforce is lopping about 4,000 jobs due to AI.
Target is getting rid of about 1,000 office jobs and 800 other positions. Microsoft began a purge of 9,000 jobs in July.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has said, the firm will “constrain headcount growth through the end of the year” and cut some jobs due to its use of AI.
Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, said AI might not be the bad guy it is painted as, according to CNBC.
“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s rather really a projection into AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,’” Stephany said.
“It’s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long term perspective and instead of saying, ‘We miscalculated this two, three years ago,’ they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying, ‘It’s because of AI though.’”
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