Behind Amazon’s Job Cuts: A Strategy Powering an AI Future

Amazon has confirmed plans to cut around 14,000 roles across its corporate division.

The move, affecting roughly 4% of the company’s estimated 350,000 corporate employees, is being framed by leadership as a strategic reshaping to seize opportunities in AI rather than simple retrenchment.

Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President at Amazon, told employees the company needs to be “organised more leanly” so it can move at the pace AI demands.

“We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth says.

The changes, she adds, will make Amazon “even stronger” by shifting resources towards its biggest bets and what matters most to customers now and in future.

CEO Andy Jassy’s operating model

The decision underscores CEO’s Andy Jassy’s push to recalibrate Amazon’s corporate culture around efficiency, speed and technological agility.

Andy has worked to streamline layers of management so the company can operate “like the world’s largest startup” as it scales AI and cloud infrastructure.

Amazon plans to invest as much as US$118bn in capital expenditures this year, largely to build new data centres for AI.

The company is also expanding facilities that will host hundreds of thousands of AI chips to support Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested US$8bn.

Andy has been candid that AI will reshape the workforce.

He told employees in June that as technology advances, some roles will be reduced while new ones emerge: “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”

From hybrid to high ownership

In late 2024, Andy issued a memo ending Amazon’s previous hybrid work policy and requiring corporate staff to return to the office full-time.

The aim was to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers, improve innovation and deepen collaboration” by flattening the organisation and empowering faster decision-making.

Andy says: “We want to work like the world’s largest startup,” a stance that demands “a mix of constant invention, high ownership, strong urgency and shared commitment.”

Speaking at Amazon’s annual seller conference in Seattle in September 2025, Andy warns against red tape: “I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organisations. As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”

Speed as a leadership choice

In his 2024 shareholder letter Andy wrote: “Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organise and remove structural barriers and build in modular ways that enable pace. But speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it.”

He concludes: “We operate like the world’s largest startup in large part because of our culture of Why. We don’t always get everything right, and we learn and iterate like crazy.

“But, we’re constantly choosing to prioritise customers, delivery, invention, ownership, speed, scrappiness, curiosity and building a company that outlasts us all. It remains Day One.”

The bigger picture

Analysts say Amazon’s restructuring echoes a broader industry shift as AI tools advance.

As Ben Barringer, technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, tells the BBC, job losses are inevitable as big tech firms redistribute and restructure their workforces.

For Amazon, the strategy is clear: reduce layers, move faster and invest heavily in AI to define its next decade of growth.