Photo Credit: Wicked Monday
Amazon prepares to lay off thousands of corporate workers this week, after the company’s current CEO warned employees that AI could take their jobs.
Amazon is preparing to lay off around 30,000 corporate workers as early as Tuesday in a reversal to its pandemic hiring spree, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Reuters reports that these cuts may affect a variety of divisions, including its human resources division, known as People Experience and Technology (PXT); operations, devices, and services; and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
On Monday, managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will begin going out on Tuesday morning, unnamed sources told Reuters.
While these layoffs represent only a small portion of Amazon’s sprawling global workforce of approximately 1.55 million employees, they will affect around 10% of its 350,000-ish corporate employees. According to CNBC, it’s the largest layoff in Amazon’s history.
The job cuts come after the Seattle-based retail giant’s CEO, Andrew Jassy, warned white-collar staff their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence within the next few years. Jassy has been undertaking an initiative to reduce what he described as “an excess of bureaucracy,” which includes reducing the number of managers at the company.
To that end, he installed an anonymous complaint line for identifying inefficiencies. So far, it has elicited around 1,500 responses and led to over 450 process changes, Jassy said earlier this year.
Amazon’s largest profit center, its cloud computing unit AWS, reported second-quarter sales of $30.9 billion—a 17.5% increase, but well below that of Microsoft’s Azure (39%) and Alphabet’s Google Cloud (32%). Notably, AWS is still reeling from a roughly 15-hour service outage last week that left many popular online services, including Snapchat, Twitch, and Venmo, flat-lined for the duration.
Meanwhile, Amazon is expecting another huge holiday selling season. The company plans to offer 250,000 seasonal warehouse jobs to help cover the load, as it has done for the past two years.
