Amazon is cutting staff again, this time affecting its Alexa voice assistant division. An internal Amazon memo sent earlier today revealed that "hundreds" of Alexa team members across the U.S. and Canada will be laid off.
The memo comes from Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, who said the unit is "changing some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities" and "maximizing our resources and efforts to focus on generative AI services."
The bad news, Rausch said, is that the decisions will also cause the company to "stop some initiatives, resulting in the elimination of hundreds of positions." The memo did not provide specific numbers on how many employees were affected or which "initiatives" would be discontinued.
Like Apple, Amazon has been surprised by the sudden rise of generative AI, which has been championed over the past year primarily by Microsoft and Google. Whether Amazon can pivot quickly enough to catch up with these efforts remains to be seen. TheInformation recently reported, citing unnamed sources, that Amazon is developing its own generative AI chatbot, said to be codenamed Olympus. The news is likely to be announced during the company's AWS Reinvent conference on November 27.
Amazon has been cutting jobs left and right over the past year. In January, the company announced it would lay off 18,000 employees, and in May it revealed it would lay off an additional 9,000 employees.
Even after the massive layoffs, Amazon continues to cut jobs in smaller but more important divisions. Just last week, the company confirmed it would lay off 180 team members from its Amazon Games division and an unspecified number of employees in its Amazon Music division.