Amazon is once again engaging in mass layoffs, this time, cutting about 14,000 jobs, which equates to roughly 4% of its white-collar workforce, as part of what it calls a push to “reduce bureaucracy” and “move faster.”
The mass layoffs, were announced on Tuesday by Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, and it marks the company’s biggest corporate shake-up since the pandemic-era boom. They’re a clear sign that the company is reorganizing around its next obsession – artificial intelligence.
In a note to Amazon’s employees, Galetti said the cuts are about operating “like the world’s largest startup,” a phrase that’s become a favorite of CEO Andy Jassy, who’s spent the last two years trying to streamline one of the most sprawling corporate structures on Earth.
“We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership,” Galetti wrote.
The layoffs will impact around 14,000 corporate roles, engineers, managers, and administrative staff, but not any warehouse or delivery workers. Those impacted will get 90 days to apply for new internal roles, plus severance, health benefits, and outplacement support if they don’t land elsewhere within Amazon.
The company said it will keep hiring in “key strategic areas,” a phrase widely read as code for AI and machine learning divisions, including AWS and logistics automation. That aligns with recent reports that Amazon plans to ramp up AI spending to better compete with Microsoft and Google.
The timing isn’t random. Tech’s biggest players have entered what amounts to an AI arms race and the price of admission is massive. Meta just announced $30 billion in AI infrastructure investments and Google is reworking nearly every product under the Gemini banner.
But with those ambitions comes a familiar tension – investors love efficiency, but employees don’t.
Last year, Amazon laid off about 27,000 workers across multiple divisions, citing “overexpansion.” This round, while significantly smaller, signals that corporate layers, the middle management Amazon once relied on to hold its empire together, are now being viewed as dead weight.
Still, Amazon insists this isn’t a retreat, it’s a realignment. “What we need to remember,” Galetti said, “is that the world is changing quickly.”
And she’s not wrong. The world Amazon helped create, one-click shopping, same-day delivery, cloud computing, now moves faster than ever. But the question is whether it can reinvent itself without breaking the parts that made it unstoppable in the first place.
For now, 14,000 people are about to find out what that reinvention looks like from the outside.