Another week, another job announcement. But this one was the type we prefer not to see: a cull of thousands of jobs at tech giant Amazon.
The bad news was confirmed in a blog post by the company’s senior vice-president of “people experience and technology”, Beth Galetti.
What it amounts to is this: the company is swinging the axe in its corporate department, confirming it will cut 14,000 jobs globally as it seeks to trim expenses. The aim, according to Amazon at least, is to “stay nimble” and strengthen the organisation.
In the corporate world, every bit of bad news is spun as having some sort of upside, and this was no exception. The cutbacks are part of the company’s efforts to strengthen its business, with Amazon investing in “big bets” and what matters most to its customers’ needs.
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Presumably, in the process, it will make even more money for its shareholders, including billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. After his multimillion-dollar, star-studded wedding in Venice in June, the petty cash box in the Bezos household may be feeling a little light. You can’t have a three-day extravaganza with a guest list that includes the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian without splashing the cash, but the rumoured $50+ million bill is a fraction of his $239 billion net worth, the equivalent of the spare change the rest of us fish for down the back of the sofa.
The good news for him is that, in the aftermath of the announcement, Amazon’s shares ticked higher. Wall Street loves a good cull.
The scale of Amazon’s job losses is notable only because the company has grown into such a behemoth in recent years. From its humble beginnings as an online bookseller in the garage of Bezos’s Bellevue home, Amazon is now a multinational spanning ecommerce, digital streaming and entertainment, cloud computing, and AI.
It has more than 1.5 million employees worldwide, with 6,500 in Ireland.
On the jobs front, it could have been much worse. Reports originally pegged the figure at 30,000. But this announcement may only be the first wave; those escaping the chop this time may still have to go through this process again in a few months.
That tech jobs are not immune from lay-offs is not something that comes as a surprise – or it shouldn’t at least. The memory of the bloodbath of 2022 and 2023, when it seemed that a different company announced job cuts every week, could not have faded significantly yet.
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Amazon was one of those companies, slashing about 27,000 positions from the company over that period.
It should be even less of a surprise that Amazon is announcing big-figure lay-offs. The warning signs have been there for months. There was the return-to-office mandate, five days a week, for staff who had been expected to deliver through natural attrition.
In an update to staff in June, chief executive Andy Jassy was clear: the company would reduce jobs in some areas while it hired in others. More AI would mean fewer corporate staff at Amazon, with generative AI and high-tech agents picking up the slack.
Now that vision is coming home to roost.
Are we likely to see more? Yes. There are plenty of companies blaming job cutbacks on AI. Salesforce, for example, cut 4,000 customer service roles last month because AI had picked up the work. Microsoft has also reduced job numbers as it spends heavily on AI.
Artificial intelligence, although yet to make good on all its promises, has given companies a way to cut costs without sacrificing their business. For years, they have been pushing staff to do more with less; now they can, in the guise of digital helpers. It also provides a handy smokescreen for companies. Blame AI.
Perhaps in years to come, newspapers will be filled with AI-generated articles, although the early applications of it have been less than inspiring. Ask the Chicago Sun-Times, which inadvertently published an article listing recommended summer reading that AI at least partially generated. The problem? Some of the books didn’t exist.
The lesson is that complete autonomy for these systems should not be the goal; rather, it should be to augment the existing workforce. Someone needs to keep AI in check, so becoming comfortable with the technology may help keep at least some human jobs in the future.
It is inevitable that the workforce will be changed by the technology. What form that change takes, however, will be down to the individual businesses.
Going back to Jassy’s original communication, the corporate cull at Amazon has begun. But while 14,000 may be a shocking number now, it is worth remembering that the second technology quoted as a potential benefit to businesses – agentic AI – is still in its very early days.
What is good for business may not necessarily be a benefit to staff. There may be more jobs displaced as a result.
Amazon’s announcement seems like an ominous sign of things to come, even for those who have fully embraced the AI era.
