Amazon to Cut 14,000 Corporate Jobs Amid AI Push

The move aims to streamline operations, flatten management, and fund a massive artificial intelligence expansion.

An employee carries sorting bags at Amazon's DUR3 Delivery Station in Milpitas, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2025. Laure Andrillon/AFP via Getty Images

Amazon said on Oct. 28 it will eliminate about 14,000 corporate positions as part of a broad restructuring effort designed to flatten management layers, reduce bureaucracy, and redirect resources toward artificial intelligence (AI) and other strategic priorities.

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, announced the layoffs in an internal memo to employees, describing them as part of an ongoing effort to make the company stronger, faster, and more innovative, while operating “like the world’s largest startup.”

“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets,” Galetti wrote.

“While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.”

The cuts represent about 4 percent of Amazon’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees and come amid an accelerating companywide pivot toward AI-driven efficiency. The retail and cloud-computing giant employs about 1.56 million people globally.

‘World’s Largest Startup’

Galetti’s message echoed CEO Andy Jassy’s repeated calls to run Amazon “like the world’s largest startup”—an idea he outlined in memos throughout 2024 and 2025 as the company sought to rekindle its entrepreneurial culture.

Jassy, who took over as CEO in 2021, has led an aggressive cost-cutting drive while making massive investments in AI and data infrastructure.

In a September 2024 note, Jassy criticized the bureaucratic bloat that can afflict large corporations and urged Amazon to preserve its “perpetual hunger to invent” and “obsession with making customers’ lives easier.” He described the company’s ethos as one of “scrappiness and frugality”—values he said were key to maintaining a competitive edge.

Galetti said that philosophy underpins the latest restructuring.

“We need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” she wrote.

Pivot Toward AI

In her memo, Galetti called AI “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” highlighting its potential to reshape how Amazon serves customers in existing segments and forays into new ones.

The restructuring, she said, will free up capital and talent for Amazon’s “biggest bets,” particularly in AI.

Jassy has framed artificial intelligence as central to Amazon’s future. In his June 2025 message to employees, he said the company was already working on more than 1,000 generative AI applications—such as customer service chatbots—but described that number as “a small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”

Beyond generative tools that create text or images, Amazon is also investing heavily in what Jassy has called “agentic AI”—autonomous software systems capable of taking action and performing complex tasks on behalf of users or other systems.

These AI “agents,” he said, can scour data, conduct deep research, write and translate code, highlight anomalies, and automate many routine tasks across industries.

Jassy predicted there will be “billions of these agents” working inside companies and across every imaginable field—as well as personal agents that assist individuals with shopping, travel, and daily chores.

“Make no mistake,” Jassy said at the time. “These agents are coming, and coming fast.”

Amazon is racing to expand its AI infrastructure as it competes with Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

Earlier this year, the company announced plans to spend about $10 billion each on new data centers in North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi. The projects will bolster Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud arm that anchors much of its AI development.

While Amazon leaders describe the company’s restructuring as a forward-looking bet on efficiency and innovation, there are sceptical voices regarding the rapid integration of AI into the workplace.

In a recent Epoch Times op-ed titled “AI Is Failing at Work, but Invading Our Lives,” writer and documentary filmmaker Kay Rubacek said that the corporate AI revolution has yet to deliver on its sweeping promises.

Citing MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025 report, Rubacek noted that 95 percent of companies remain stuck in pilot mode, testing AI tools without successfully deploying them at scale—producing, in her words, “zero return on investment.”

“AI was sold as a new compass for the modern workplace,” she wrote, “but so far, it seems to have spun more than it has pointed.”