USA 
United Kingdom
Amazon’s latest round of layoffs - affecting 14,000 corporate workers - is not about saving money or replacing people with technology, according to CEO Andy Jassy.
Speaking on the company’s quarterly earnings call, Jassy said the decision stemmed from “culture,” not cost-cutting. “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,” he told analysts. “It’s culture.”
The comments come days after the company’s senior vice president of people cited “transformative technology” as a factor in the restructuring. While Amazon has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence, Jassy said this week’s layoffs were about ensuring the company’s workforce fits its values and operating style.
Middle management targeted in job cuts
The 14,000 affected roles were primarily middle-management positions. The move followed a June memo in which Jassy told staff that advances in AI would enable the company to operate with fewer employees over time.
Amazon currently employs about 1.55 million people worldwide, including 350,000 in corporate positions. Before the pandemic, in December 2019, the company reported 798,000 employees in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“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 said.
He added that such rapid expansion can erode accountability and slow decision-making. “Sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions, the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,” he said.
Focus on cultural realignment
Jassy’s comments suggest the layoffs form part of a broader effort to refocus Amazon’s structure around speed and ownership, values that have been central to its culture since its early years.
While many large employers have tied recent workforce reductions to AI-related productivity gains, Jassy emphasized that this round was about alignment rather than automation, marking a shift in tone from earlier communications that linked job cuts to efficiency.
The layoffs follow what has been a year of transformation for Amazon’s white-collar workforce, as the company consolidates overlapping business units and trims management layers to streamline decision-making.
For Jassy, the challenge now lies in maintaining agility at a company that has doubled in size since 2019.
