Online retail giant Amazon will eliminate roughly 14,000 corporate positions in a sweeping restructuring effort aimed at cutting bureaucracy, flattening management layers, and redirecting resources toward artificial intelligence (AI) and other long-term initiatives.
The company announced that the human employees, described by Amazon executives as “bloat,” will be replaced with artificial intelligence (AI).
The layoffs, outlined in an internal memo by Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, mark the latest phase of CEO Andy Jassy’s multiyear campaign to transform the retail and tech giant into what he calls “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 in her message to employees.
“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% of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees and come as the company accelerates its focus on AI-driven efficiency.
Amazon employs roughly 1.56 million people worldwide, including warehouse and logistics workers.
Restructuring for Speed and Innovation
Galetti framed the move as part of a long-term strategy to keep Amazon nimble and competitive amid growing pressure from investors and rivals in both retail and cloud computing.
“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 said.
The message echoed Jassy’s repeated warnings against corporate “bloat.”
Since taking over as CEO in 2021, Jassy has pushed a back-to-basics culture emphasizing “scrappiness and frugality,” values he says are key to maintaining Amazon’s edge.
In a September 2024 memo, Jassy criticized the tendency of large corporations to become bogged down by middle management and red tape, urging employees to “preserve our perpetual hunger to invent.”
AI at the Center of Amazon’s Future
Galetti described AI as “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” calling it central to Amazon’s growth strategy and a catalyst for reassigning capital and talent.
Jassy has positioned artificial intelligence, particularly generative and “agentic” AI systems, as the company’s defining focus for the decade ahead.
In a June 2025 companywide message, he said Amazon is developing more than 1,000 generative AI applications, including customer service chatbots and business automation tools.
He described those efforts as “a small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”
Beyond generative models that create text and images, Amazon is investing in autonomous “AI agents.”
These “agents” are actually software that is capable of conducting research, analyzing data, writing code, and performing complex tasks independently.
“Make no mistake,” Jassy told employees earlier this year.
“These agents are coming, and coming fast.”
He predicted that billions of such agents will eventually operate inside businesses and consumer environments, automating tasks across industries while creating new revenue streams for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
$40 Billion AI Infrastructure Expansion
To support that vision, Amazon is rapidly expanding its data infrastructure.
In 2025, the company announced plans to invest $10 billion each in new data centers across North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi.
These projects will strengthen AWS, the cloud division driving much of Amazon’s AI research.
The spending spree underscores Amazon’s intent to compete head-to-head with Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI as the global AI arms race intensifies.
Jassy has portrayed these investments as essential to maintaining Amazon’s long-term dominance.
His message to employees has remained consistent: embrace innovation, streamline bureaucracy, and bet big on artificial intelligence.
“We’re not standing still,” Jassy said in a recent statement.
“We’re building the next generation of tools that will define how the world works and shops.”
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