Amazon said it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs as it restructures and looks to leverage AI to boost efficiency.
The move isn't surprising given many enterprises have said they aren't hiring and looking to AI to automate more jobs and processes.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said the company wants to operate like a startup and continue to cut costs and improve margins. Jassy also noted that the company is looking to increase the ratio of individuals to managers. Amazon has 1.54 million total employees.
According to Amazon, the restructuring will make the company 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."
The company said it will continue to hire more in some spaces while trimming other roles. The broader trend is that enterprises are looking at AI to take on more roles. These AI transformation efforts mostly revolve around augmenting human workers, but the outcome is that you simply need fewer people to run a company. See:
- CCE 2025: AI agents: Dreams, reality and what's next
- Why CxOs, enterprises need to follow OpenAI’s GDPval LLM benchmark
- Citigroup AI agent pilot underway for 5,000 workers
- Goldman Sachs eyes next AI transformation from position of strength
Beth Galetti, SVP of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, 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 organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business."
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that Amazon isn't unique. JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum said on the company's most recent earnings call that the bank is being disciplined with expenses.
"We're going to have a very strong bias against having the reflective response to any given need to be to hire more people and feeling a little bit more confident on our ability to put that pressure on the organization because we know that even if we can't always measure it that precisely, there are definitely productivity tailwinds from AI," said Barnum. "You can assume that we're going to be pushing hard on all fronts to extract as much productivity out of the organization as possible."
