Amazon is preparing to lay off tens of thousands of corporate workers, reversing its pandemic hiring spree. The cuts come months after the retail giant’s CEO warned white-collar employees their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence.
The Seattle-based technology firm is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, media outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, as it tries to cut costs and undo the vast recruitment drive it embarked on at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which unleashed an extraordinary – but fleeting – surge in demand for online shopping.
While the layoffs would represent a small portions of Amazon’s sprawling global workforce of 1.55 million employees, they would hit about 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees. CNBC called it the largest layoff in the company’s history.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Shares in the firm, which is scheduled to report quarterly earnings later this week, rose 1.2% on Monday.
Other giants of the internet have likewise backtracked on the major hiring undertaken during the coronavirus pandemic. Microsoft; Meta, parent of Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook; and Alphabet, parent of Google and YouTube, have all laid off tens of thousands of workers in the past three years.
Back in June, the group’s CEO, Andy Jassy, told employees that AI agents – tools that carry out tasks autonomously – and generative AI systems such as chatbots would require fewer employees in some areas.
“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,” Jassy wrote in a memo to staff.
In recent years, Amazon has been trimming smaller numbers of jobs across multiple divisions, including devices, communications, podcasting and others.
This week’s wave of cuts is expected to affect a wide variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as people experience and technology, devices and services and operations, among others. Fortune reported that as many as 15% of the firm’s HR roles could be hit, citing multiple sources familiar with Amazon’s plans.
Managers of affected teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following notifications that will start going out via email tomorrow morning, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources.
Jassy has been undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy at the company, including by reducing the number of managers, and introduced an anonymous complaint line for claims of inefficiencies that has elicited about 1,500 responses and more than 450 process changes, he said earlier this year.
Reuters contributed reporting
