From “technocracy.news”
AI certainly was used to balance the staffing, and undoubtedly will be used to generate the pink slips and send out the emails. This is the harbinger of things to come, and this has nothing to do with robots – that starts in 2026. Amazon intends to use AI and robots to fully automate its operations by 2030, potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work. If technology fails to deliver, Amazon will find its smoldering carcass in the dumpster. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Amazon is preparing to announce sweeping job cuts beginning Tuesday, CNBC has learned.
The layoffs will amount to the largest reductions to Amazon’s corporate workforce in the company’s history, spanning almost every business, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
Amazon is expected to begin informing employees of the layoffs via email Tuesday morning, the person said.
The company plans to lay off as many as 30,000 staffers across its corporate workforce, according to Reuters, which first reported the news.
Amazon declined to comment.
Amazon is the nation’s second-largest private employer, with more than 1.54 million staffers globally as of the end of the second quarter. That figure is primarily made up of its warehouse workforce. It has roughly 350,000 corporate employees.
The planned layoffs would also represent the biggest job cuts across the tech industry since at least 2020, according to Layoffs.fyi. As of Monday, more than 200 tech companies have laid off approximately 98,000 employees since the start of the year, according to the site, which monitors job reductions in the tech sector.
Over the past year, companies across industries including tech, banking, auto and retail have also pointed to the rise of generative AI as a force that’s likely to or already changing the size of their workforces.
Amazon has conducted rolling layoffs across the company since 2022, which has resulted in more than 27,000 employees being let go. Job reductions have continued this year, though at a smaller scale. Amazon’s cloud, stores, communications and devices divisions have been hit with cuts in recent months.
The layoffs are part of a broader cost-cutting campaign by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that began during the Covid-19 pandemic. Jassy has also moved to simplify Amazon’s corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations.”
Jassy said in June that Amazon’s workforce could shrink further as a result of the company embracing generative AI, telling staffers that the company “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce,” Jassy said in the June memo to staff.