Amazon announced it will cut about 14,000 jobs in a major restructuring. This round of layoffs will affect the company's corporate workforce. Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of employee experience and technology, said in a blog post on Tuesday: "The layoffs we announced today are a continuation of the company's ongoing efforts to further strengthen the resilience of the enterprise by reducing management layers, streamlining the organization, and redirecting resources to those strategic areas that are most important and have the greatest potential for customers now and in the future."
According to a Reuters report on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, the total number of layoffs may affect up to 30,000 positions. As a world-renowned online retailer and cloud computing service provider, Amazon employed approximately 1.55 million employees worldwide as of June 30. The company is scheduled to release financial results for the quarter ended September 30 on Thursday.
Since Andy Jassy took over as CEO of Amazon, the company has had multiple rounds of layoffs and project closures. He implemented a series of layoff measures from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, eliminating a total of approximately 27,000 corporate positions.
In June of this year, Jassy said that as Amazon further uses artificial intelligence to complete tasks originally performed by humans, the company's employee size is expected to shrink. A person familiar with the matter revealed that Jassy continued to emphasize the need to increase the proportion of automation, and pointed out that despite continuous layoffs in the past three years, the "overstaffing" problem caused by the company's expansion during the epidemic still exists.
After Jassy made remarks related to artificial intelligence, Amazon immediately tightened its cost expenditures. The company set more aggressive voluntary redundancy targets this summer and chose not to fill vacancies when they became available in its corporate logistics and advertising departments.