Amazon to Lay Off Tens of Thousands of Corporate Workers
The cuts could amount to roughly 10% of the online giant’s white-collar workforce
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Amazon Spheres in downtown Seattle. IAN ALLEN FOR WSJ
Amazon.com plans to lay off as many as 30,000 starting as early as Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest cost-cutting move for the tech giant that is seeking to slim down and conserve cash.
The job cuts, which won’t all happen this week, would amount to roughly 10% of the online giant’s corporate workforce, the people said.
Thousands of corporate pink slips are expected to go out Tuesday, cutting across the organization and hitting human resources, cloud computing, advertising and a number of other business units, the people said. The total number of reductions hasn’t been finalized, one of the people said.
Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy has been on a yearslong campaign to cut expenses as the company ramped up spending on artificial intelligence, as it faced increased competition for its cloud computing business.
Reuters earlier reported the number of job cuts.
The latest round of job cuts would be the largest since 2022, when Amazon eliminated around 27,000 roles. That layoff occurred in waves.
The company views the cuts in part as an effort to correct an aggressive hiring period during the pandemic, the people said. During that period, a boom in online shopping led Amazon to double its warehouse network over a two-year period.
Amazon CEO Jassy has sought to find ways for the company to do more with less. In June Jassy sent a note to employees that said increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain jobs. He called generative AI a once-in-a-lifetime technological change that is already altering how Amazon deals with consumers and other businesses and how it conducts its own operations, including job cuts.
“??As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said at the time. “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.”
Amazon is due to report financial results for the third quarter on October 30.
More big companies are betting they can grow without hiring.
JPMorgan Chase’s chief financial officer told investors recently that the bank now has a “very strong bias against having the reflective response” to hire more people. Aerospace and defense company RTX boasted last week that its sales rose even without adding employees.
Goldman Sachs sent a memo to staffers this month saying the firm “will constrain head count growth through the end of the year” and reduce roles that could be more efficient with AI. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, has said it plans to keep its head count roughly flat over the next three years, even as its sales grow.
Earlier this month, Amazon showed off how investments in robots and AI could help drive down costs, boosting sales without the need for as many human workers. A robot arm called Blue Jay is expected to enable Amazon to build smaller warehouses in urban areas, where it couldn’t previously operate.
The company is also experimenting with using AI tools to predict what customers might want to buy and suggest items to add to a shopping basket.
