Amazon to cut 30,000 office jobs as AI investments reshape company priorities

Amazon is set to lay off tens of thousands of office workers as part of a major cost-cutting drive while ramping up investments in artificial intelligence, according to multiple US media reports.

Around 30,000 positions are expected to be eliminated starting Tuesday, marking nearly 10 percent of Amazon’s approximately 350,000 office roles. The cuts will not affect the company’s distribution and warehouse employees, who make up the majority of Amazon’s 1.5 million-strong global workforce.

Seattle-based Amazon has not responded to requests for comment from AFP regarding the reports, which were first published by outlets including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Shares in the company closed slightly higher on Monday as word of the potential layoffs spread.

Chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly highlighted the transformative potential of AI, saying it can make operations more efficient and improve customer experiences. “Our conviction that AI will change every customer experience is starting to play out,” Jassy said during the company’s most recent earnings call.

Amazon will announce its next earnings report on Thursday and faces mounting investor pressure to demonstrate returns from its massive AI investments. “AWS will be under pressure to both show revenue acceleration and operating margin improvement in light of its massive AI investments,” said Emarketer principal analyst Sky Canaves, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud division.

The tech giant is also expected to face questions about a recent AWS outage that disrupted major internet services worldwide.

The incident, which lasted several hours last week, brought down popular platforms such as Disney+, Airbnb, Snapchat, and Duolingo, as well as Amazon’s own Prime Video and e-commerce site. In Europe, messaging apps including WhatsApp and Signal, as well as some banks like Lloyd’s, also experienced service interruptions.

Amazon attributed the disruption to a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), a core component of the internet that routes data traffic.

AWS remains the global leader in cloud computing, ahead of Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, with businesses, governments, and consumers worldwide relying heavily on its infrastructure.

SR