Amazon Preps Employees for Layoffs by Talking Up the Power of AI Agents

Amazon appears to be soft-launching its next round of layoffs. In a message to employees shared Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy talked highly of the company’s embrace of artificial intelligence tools across its company, and said that it will ultimately “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” over time. That is only slightly veiled corporate speak for “get ready to be replaced.”

Jassy called generative AI a “once-in-a-lifetime” technology that will change the way the company operates, and said Amazon is already using it in “virtually every corner of the company.” According to Jassy, Amazon already has over 1,000 Generative AI services and applications in progress or built, and said, “that’s a small fraction of what we will ultimately build.” So it’s clear the company is all in on AI. Amazon previously said it would commit $100 billion to investing in AI technologies this year.

As for humans? Well, it seems Amazon is not so committed to them long-term. Jassy told the company’s 1.5 million employees that generative AI will “change the way our work is done,” and said that the company will ultimately “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”

The underlying message: you might soon be out of work. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy wrote.

The CEO did offer his workers, some of whom are likely wondering just how long they’ll be employed, how to potentially survive the next round of layoffs (or, maybe more likely, help train their future replacements). “As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”

Amazon has been in the process of stripping its workforce down to the bones in departments it seems to care less about. The company cut about 100 people from its devices and services team earlier this year, and around the same number from its books department. Per CNBC, it has laid off about 27,000 people since 2022 and has its eyes on further cuts.

It’s hard to look at Jassy’s AI-forward message as much else other than an indicator that more layoffs are just around the corner. It’s possible the AI hype is just a cynical attempt to position itself as being an industry leader when the real goal is cutting salaries to boost stock price. It wouldn’t be the first company to try to go all-in on AI at the expense of human labor. Earlier this year, Klarna announced it was bringing back human customer service representatives after trying to leave the task to AI after finding the outcomes aren’t great and people don’t really like dealing with AI agents.