Amazon senior vice president for emerging markets Amit Agarwal has opened up on 14,000 job cuts that happened in October this year and the reasons behind
it. In an interview with Economic Times, Agarwal said that the recent layoffs at Amazon were done to get rid of organisational layers at the company. The idea was to make Amazon function like a startup with agility amid AI boom, the VP said. Amazon laid off about 14,000 employees in October, affecting nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce. In India, an estimated 800 to 1,000 roles across finance, marketing, HR and technology were impacted, according to ET. Also Read: Amazon Removed Around 14,000 Employees This Year Including 40 Percent Engineers “To operate that way, we need fewer layers. The workforce reductions are primarily about removing those layers, and we’ll continue to do that because we want to stay lean and move like a startup. At the same time, we’ll keep hiring where we need to,” Agarwal told ET. He further emphasised that the restructure was in sync with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's vision to make the company the "biggest startup". The tech giant is also pushing for more AI usage to increase the productivity. Last month, the Amazon CEO offered his perspective on the company’s recent layoffs, emphasising that the cuts were neither driven by AI nor aimed at reducing costs. Instead, he said the primary factor behind the 14,000 job losses was “culture”. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “It really — it's culture,” he added. Explaining further, Jassy said, “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.” He noted that when this happens, “Sometimes, without realising it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work.”
Amazon’s quick commerce strategy in India
Speaking about Amazon’s growing presence in India’s competitive quick commerce market, Agarwal said the company’s expansion would focus on Prime membership hotspots rather than a rigid city-by-city rollout. “Our expansion isn’t tied to a fixed city count. It’s centred on Prime-dense clusters. We want to cover the largest percentage of Prime members with that service,” he noted.
