Amazon links planned mass layoff to AI
E-commerce giant Amazon has cited artificial intelligence as a key driver of its decision to lay off thousands of its corporate employees
Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 employees amid an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cost-cutting drive.
On 28 October 2025, Amazon’s senior vice-president of people, experience and technology Beth Galetti confirmed to employees that the e-commerce behemoth plans to axe 14,000 roles from its corporate workforce, something she specified has been prompted and enabled by the firm’s AI investments.
“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs,” she said in a message sent to employees.
While Galetti signalled further cuts down the line as the company searches for further ways to “realise efficiency gains”, she also said that Amazon expects “to continue hiring in key strategic areas” through 2026.
Although she did not give any indication of what roles are being cut, from which business units or where they will be located globally, she said most employees being let go will be offered a 90-day window to look for new roles internally.
Galetti explicitly cited AI as a key factor contributing to the layoffs. “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well … What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” she said.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Galetti also referenced and linked to two previous employee messages from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. In the first, from September 2024, Jassy outlined the company’s ambitions “to operate like the world’s largest startup”, while in the second, from June 2025, he evangelised the “once-in-a-lifetime” potential of generative AI (GenAI) technologies to achieve this.
Highlighting how “AI will be a substantial catalyst” reshaping Amazon’s future workforce composition, Jassy said in June 2025 that over the next few years, “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company”.
He concluded by encouraging employees to “be curious” and “educate yourself” about the technology’s potential: “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”
Amazon’s last major round of job cuts came in early 2023. While the company sought to initially cut 18,000 jobs from its workforce in January that year, citing over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic, a further 9,000 cuts were announced that March, bringing the total to 27,000. A further round of job losses, which affected several hundred tech and sales staff at Amazon Web Services (AWS) specifically, came in April 2024.
From January to August 2024 thousands of tech sector jobs were axed, with many tech firms explicitly linking the layoffs taking place to the proliferation of AI and machine learning throughout their businesses.
This included Cisco, which cut 7% of its workforce while investing $1bn in AI-related startups; Dell, which cut sales roles to reallocate resources to its AI teams; Meta, which, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, laid employees off “so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around AI”; and Intuit, which cut 1,800 staff to free up more resources for integrating AI into its software offerings.
In November 2023, the Autonomy Institute think tank argued that although automating jobs with large language models (LLMs) could lead to significant reductions in working time without a loss of pay or productivity, realising the benefits of AI-driven productivity gains in this way will require concerted political action.
In a paper published 20 November 2023, Autonomy forecast that AI-led productivity gains could enable 8.8 million UK workers to have a four-day work week by 2033, while just under 28 million could have their working hours reduced by 10% in the same time, if LLMs are deployed in the right way.
“Our research offers a fresh perspective in debates around how AI can be utilised for good,” said Autonomy’s director of research, Will Stronge, at the time. “A shorter working week is the most tangible way of ensuring that AI delivers benefits to workers as well as companies. If AI is to be implemented fairly across the economy, it should usher in a new era of four-day working weeks for all.”
Autonomy noted that although people have long been predicting and expecting far shorter working weeks due to technological advances, historical increases in productivity over recent decades have not translated into increased wealth or leisure time for most people, largely as a result of economic inequality.
It said there is often a sense of pessimism around AI-driven productivity gains, with most conversations emphasising the potential for job losses and degraded working conditions, but that such gains could also be used to deliver shorter working weeks for many while also maintaining their pay and performance.
However, Autonomy was clear that productivity gains are not always shared evenly between employers and employees, and depend on “geographic, demographics, economic cycle and other intrinsic job market factors” such as workers’ access to collective bargaining.
“This is a paper that identifies an opportunity and not a destiny. The actual diffusion and adoption of technology is always uneven, driven by a variety of factors: wage levels, government policy, levels of sector monopolisation, trade union density and so on,” it said.
