Amazon is laying off workers en masse because of AI and automation

28 October 06:27

Amazon (AMZN.O) plans to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs as early as Tuesday to reduce costs and offset over-hiring during the pandemic. Three sources familiar with the situation told Reuters, "Komersant Ukrainian" reported

This represents nearly 10 percent of Amazon’s total corporate workforce, which is now about 350,000, and would be the largest reduction since 2022, when about 27,000 positions were eliminated.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

Which divisions will be affected

The cuts will affect:

people Experience and Technology (PXT) departments,
operating divisions,
devices and services divisions,
amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business.

Managers were already given special training on Monday on how to properly notify employees of layoffs. The first notification emails will start arriving Tuesday morning.

What’s behind the decision

Amazon CEO Andy Jesse has been aggressively reducing bureaucracy and the number of managers. He introduced an anonymous complaint line so employees can report inefficient processes. This has already led to over 450 changes in the company.

Jesse also said that the active adoption of artificial intelligence will lead to automation of routine work and, as a result, more layoffs.

“This move shows that Amazon is already getting enough productivity from AI in corporate teams to cut staff,” notes eMarketer analyst Sky Kanaves.

Additional factors

A program launched earlier this year to bring employees back to work five days a week, one of the most rigorous in the tech industry, hasn’t resulted in enough attrition, two people said, citing that as another reason for the scale of the layoffs.

Some employees who don’t work every day because they live far from corporate offices or for other reasons are being told they have voluntarily quit Amazon and should leave without severance pay, a cost-saving move for the company.

According to Layoffs.fyi, tech companies have already laid off 98,000 workers in 2025.

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AWS is losing momentum

Amazon Web Services, the company’s main source of revenue

posted second-quarter sales of $30.9 billion (17.5%)
but that’s well below the growth of Microsoft’s Azure (39%) and Google Cloud (32%) cloud services

AWS is expected to show 18% in the third quarter, which is worse than last year’s pace. AWS also recently experienced a 15-hour outage that affected Snapchat and Venmo.