Workers move products during Cyber Monday at Amazon's fulfillment centre in Robbinsville, N.J., in December. The company on Wednesday said it would eliminate 16,000 jobs worldwide, including Canada.Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Amazon AMZN-Q said on Wednesday it was cutting 16,000 jobs worldwide in the second major round of layoffs at the company in three months, as it restructures after pandemic-era over-hiring and expands the adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
Reuters first reported last week that Amazon was planning a second round of job cuts as part of a broader goal of trimming about 30,000 corporate roles, with the layoffs expected to affect workers in Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and human resources departments.
Amazon slashed 14,000 white-collar jobs in late October, with CEO Andy Jassy stressing the need for the company to eliminate excessive bureaucracy by trimming operational levels and reducing the number of managers.
“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan,” said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon.
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Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday by sending a commiseration e-mail and teamwide meeting invitation hours early.
The e-mail sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that affected employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.
The job cuts announced Wednesday underscore how artificial intelligence is changing corporate work force dynamics. Significant improvements in AI assistants are helping enterprises execute duties from routine administrative tasks to complex coding problems with rapid speed and precision, driving widespread adoption.
Jassy had said last summer that the increased use of AI tools would lead to more automation of duties, resulting in corporate job losses.
Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway.
The 30,000 jobs would together represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but nearly 10 per cent of its corporate work force. The majority of Amazon’s workers are in fulfilment centres and warehouses.
Tech giants, including Amazon, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms META-Q and Microsoft MSFT-Q, had sharply ramped up hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic demand surge and have lately been restructuring their work force.
Amazon has also been investing in robotics at its warehouses to speed up packaging and deliveries for its e-commerce segment, reduce the reliance on human labour and cutting costs.
The company is set to report quarterly results next week.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated that Canadian employees were affected by the layoffs. Amazon has not indicated where the layoffs are happening.