(Reuters) -Amazon said on Tuesday it will reduce its corporate workforce by about 14,000 people, in a major shakeup driven in part by adoption of artificial intelligence that will result in more cuts next year as well.
This will help the company with "further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets," according to a note sent to employees earlier in the day and posted on the company website.
Reuters first reported on Monday Amazon was
planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company compensates for over-hiring during the peak demand of the pandemic.
Amazon had about 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees at the end of last year. Its corporate workforce includes roughly 350,000 employees.
Over the past two years, the company has been carrying out piecemeal job cuts across divisions including books, devices and its Wondery podcast business.
That has already helped teams move faster and the company will continue to manage hiring by "reducing in some areas and hiring in others" heading into 2026, said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, in the note.
The company will also offer most affected workers 90 days to look for a new role internally and said its recruiting teams would prioritize those candidates.
AI EFFORTS
The note reiterated CEO Andy Jassy's push to reduce management layers and lean more on AI. He had said in June growing adoption of generative AI tools would reduce the total corporate workforce at the e-commerce giant in the next few years.
Amazon is expected to shell out roughly $118 billion in capital expenditures for the year, with much of it going towards building AI and cloud infrastructure.
Corporations are increasingly using the technology to write code for their software and adopting AI agents to automate routine tasks, as they look to save costs and cut reliance on people.
"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," Galetti said.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
