Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon

Amazonannounced a new round of layoffs last month, impacting about 14,000 employees. Days later CEOAndy Jassyclarified that the job cuts are not impacted by AI or aimed to cut costs. Instead, the reason behind Amazon’s 14,000 job cuts is ‘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 while speaking at the company’s quarterly earnings call.“It really — it’s culture,” he added.“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,” Jassy explained during the earnings call.

“And when that happens, Sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work,” he continued. “And it can lead to slowing you down.”

What Amazon said announcing the 14,000 job cuts

Announcing the job cuts, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti said that the company is ‘making organizational changes … which will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others’.“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Galetti explained.This round of Amazon layoffs is one of its biggest since late 2022, when it started to eliminate around 27,000 positions.During the earnings call, Amazon revealed that last quarter’s layoffs came with an estimated $1.8 billion in severance costs.

When Amazon CEO ‘warned’ about company wide layoffs

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy first warned its employees against the workforce reduction in June 2025. The early signal gave staff a preview of what would become one of the company’s largest layoff rounds since the pandemic era.In a company-wide message dated June 17, Jassy explicitly stated that AI adoption would fundamentally reshape Amazon’s staffing needs.”We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote, adding that the company expected “this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.”He then described generative AI as “the most transformative technology since the Internet” and emphasized the company’s commitment to operating like “the world’s largest start-up—customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy.”