Amazon Axes 16000 Jobs as It Pushes AI and Efficiency

On Wednesday, Amazon confirmed 16,000 corporate job cuts — a plan for roughly 30,000 since October — but said it was not yet open to further cuts.

Last week, Reuters first reported that Amazon was planning to have a second round of job cuts as part of its larger goal under CEO Andy Jassy, who has been trying to reduce bureaucracy and abandon poor businesses.

Amazon said Tuesday that it was closing its last bricks-and-mortar Fresh grocery stores and Go markets, despite years of work, “was dropping its Amazon One biometric payment system,” which scans the palm of a customer’s hand.

While 30,000 is the equivalent of only half Amazon’s 1 per cent, it represents just under-the-radar. It is nearly 10 percent of its corporate workforce and represents the largest job cuts in its three-decades, 58 million employees (mainly in fulfillment centers and warehouses) over 27,000 it reduced between late 2022 and early 2023.

But the job cuts were needed to strengthen the company by “reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy” at Amazon, its top human resources executive Beth Galetti said in a post.

Galetti left open the possibility of further reductions, saying some teams will continue to “make adjustments as appropriate”.

This new cut marks the second wave of layoffs in three months following 14,000 job cuts by Amazon last October that it was ‘advanced with artificial intelligence and concerns over shifting corporate culture’, which led to blame for the latest cuts.

Amazon has also said it overhired during the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for online shopping skyrocketed.

This is the beginning of a new rhythm, where we announce broad cuts every few months,” Galetti said in Wednesday’s note. She added ‘That’s not what we want to do with .

‘Project Dawn’

Amazon on Tuesday accidentally sent an email to some employees at Amazon Web Services that said the layoff plan was “Project Dawn” and irritated thousands of workers.

But while employees from several AWS units, the Alexa voice assistant, Prime Video, devices and advertising and last mile delivery, among others, indicated online and in emails to Reuters that they had been affected by the full scope of the cuts.

A Reuters request for comment on the corporate job cuts, which began Tuesday’s announcement that it would close the Fresh and Go stores, did not respond to a request from Amazon.

Job cuts also underscore how artificial intelligence is changing corporate workforce dynamics. AI assistants are making significant improvements in AI to help enterprises perform tasks from routine administrative work to complex coding problems with high speed and accuracy, leading to widespread adoption of the language.

Increasing use of AI tools would mean more automation of work, Jassy said last summer, leading to corporate job losses.

Last week, executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos said that while jobs would go away, new ones would appear — two telling Reuters AI would be an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway.

As part of the COVID-19 pandemic demand surge, tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms and Microsoft stepped up hiring sharply during this wave of technology that has since recently been restructuring. Staff cuts were announced in recent days by UPS, Pinterest and ASML all of them.

The warehouses of Amazon have been investing in robotic technology to speed up packaging and deliveries for its e-commerce business, reduce human labour dependency and lower costs.

The price of shares in Amazon — slated to report quarterly results next week — was down less than 1 percent in pre-market trading.

© Thomson Reuters 2026