Amazon said on Wednesday it was cutting 16,000 jobs worldwide in the second major round of layoffs at the company in three months, as it restructures after pandemic-era over-hiring and expands the adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
Reuters first reported last week that Amazon was planning a second round of job cuts as part of a broader goal of trimming about 30,000 corporate roles, with the layoffs expected to affect workers in Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and human resources departments.
Amazon employs over 6,000 people in Cork, Dublin, and Drogheda.
Amazon slashed 14,000 white-collar jobs in late October, with CEO Andy Jassy saying the company needed to eliminate excessive bureaucracy by trimming operational levels and reducing the number of managers.
“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan,” said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon.
The job cuts underscore how artificial intelligence is changing corporate workforce dynamics. Significant improvements in AI assistants are helping enterprises execute duties from routine administrative tasks to complex coding problems with rapid speed and precision, driving widespread adoption.
Mr Jassy had said last summer that the increased use of AI tools would lead to more automation of duties, resulting in corporate job losses.
The 30,000 jobs would together represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58m employees, with the majority of Amazon’s workers are in fulfillment centres and warehouses, but nearly 10% of its corporate workforce.
Tech giants, including Amazon, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms and Microsoft, had sharply ramped up hiring during the covid pandemic demand surge and have lately been restructuring their workforce.
Amazon has also been investing in robotics at its warehouses to speed up packaging and deliveries for its e-commerce segment, reduce the reliance on human labor and cutting costs.
On Tuesday night, Amazon appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.
The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.
In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn”.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Ms Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”
Reuters
