Amazon is cutting its global corporate workforce by around 14,000, as it seeks to cut costs and further pivot to AI-driven roles.
The chop is not as big as suggested in earlier media reports, which had mooted job losses of up to 30,000 workers not employed in warehouses and non-corporate function offices.
Amazon employs over 1.5m across its global warehouses and offices, and the latest cuts will make an impact among those 350,000 staff employed in corporate offices, including managers, HR workers, and sales teams, among other areas.
These cuts come on top of around 27,000 axed in 2022. On Thursday, Amazon will post its third quarter results for the period ending 30 September. All eyes will be on how much Amazon is making from its big AI bet so far.
Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a note to staff the cuts would make Amazon "even stronger", by shifting resources "to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs".
Amazon has not confirmed how many jobs will go across Europe, and how many roles will disappear at its most profitable business unit, Amazon Web Services, which suffered a 14-hour outage last week.
At the end of July, the Amazon group reported second quarter results that included a 13% year-over-year sales increase to $167.7 billion.
Galetti added the cuts were needed because AI was "the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet", and it "enabled firms to innovate much faster than ever before”.
"We need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," she maintained.
