When Amazon last went on a hiring spree, the world was in lockdown. To keep up with demand, it hired over 175,000 additional people during the pandemic. Warehouses were bursting, deliveries were stretched thin, and hundreds of thousands joined the payroll to keep the machine running.
Fast forward a few years, and the story looks very different. According to Reuters, Amazon is preparing to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning this week, nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce, and its largest round of layoffs since 2022, when 27,000 positions were eliminated. The cuts will affect multiple divisions, including Human Resources (known internally as People Experience and Technology or PXT), operations, devices, services, and even Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The reason, according to company insiders, is efficiency. CEO Andy Jassy has been slowly dismantling layers of management, pushing for leaner teams, and introducing automation into workflows that once needed armies of people. He’s even set up an internal complaint line to flag inefficiencies, and thousands of suggestions have poured in, many of them now turned into operational changes.
The restructuring follows an unsuccessful attempt to reduce headcount through attrition. Earlier this year, the company brought back its strict five-day office rule, hoping some remote workers would quit on their own. Instead, some remote staff who couldn’t comply were labelled as having “voluntarily resigned,” allowing Amazon to avoid formal layoffs and severance costs.
These cuts are also part of a longer-term effort to realign resources toward higher-margin areas such as cloud services and automation. Jassy has repeatedly said that technologies like machine learning will improve productivity and reduce repetitive work, but not all of those changes have been painless. “This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realising enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst.
It also points to larger cost-cutting measures involving automation. According to reports citing leaked internal documents, Amazon is preparing one of the biggest workplace automation initiatives in history, with the goal of having more than 600,000 American jobs replaced by robots by 2033. The e-commerce behemoth reportedly plans to automate around 75% of its operations, including fulfillment centers, shipping logistics, and warehousing chores. This large-scale automation is expected to save approximately $12.6 billion between 2025 and 2027, equating to a reduction of about 30 cents per item shipped.
Amazon’s move echoes a wider trend across the tech industry. Layoffs.fyi reports that nearly 100,000 tech workers have been laid off this year alone. Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all fine-tuning their workforces around AI efficiencies. Earlier this month, Meta laid off around 600 workers from its AI division as part of ongoing efforts to streamline operations and consolidate overlapping teams. Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, still leads in profits but trails in growth compared to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, a gap that’s likely fuelling its urgency to automate further and tighten costs.
Why Is Meta Cutting Jobs in Its AI Division?
Even as Meta pours billions into AI, layoffs still seem inevitable.
Amazon’s latest cuts indicate the company’s current philosophy. The firm that once hired to scale is now scaling to automate. What began as a pandemic-era surge in human labour is evolving into an AI-powered shift in how work itself is defined. The machine, in more ways than one, is running leaner than ever.
Amazon is laying off 9,000 employees
Amazon is set to lay off another round of 9,000 employees in the upcoming weeks. This was announced by Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy in a blog post sent to employees on Monday. According to the CEO Jassy, the decision to streamline its costs and headcount comes amidst an “uncertain
