Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says that the company’s latest round of layoffs that impacted barely 14,000 people is not because of money or AI. Instead, the real reason behind Amazon job cuts is the culture, Jassy said. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” he said as quoted by Business Insider. “It really — it’s culture.”“And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” Jassy explained. “And when that happens, Sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work,” he added. “And it can lead to slowing you down.”In a blog post dated October 28, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti announced that the e-commerce company is “making organizational changes across Amazon that will impact some of our teammates.” “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,” she said.Amazon’s latest job cuts is the company’s biggest layoff since 2022 when the company laid off 27,000 positions. Jassy’s remarks contradict what Amazon executives have been saying about the job cuts.In the blog post, Galetti explained “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”Separately, Tapas Roy, vice president of device software and services sent a company-wide email this week saying the company is cutting roles within its OS & Services team and asked remaining workers to “lean in on AI.”
