Amazon has announced that it will be laying off 14,000 employees in what the company is calling “organizational changes.”

In a memo posted to the corporate website and shared with employees, called "Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations," Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti, said that the company wants “to operate like the world’s largest startup” and it needs "the right structure to drive that level of speed and ownership, and the need to be set up to invent, collaborate, be connected, and deliver the absolute best for customers."

CNN reported the layoffs were to get the company ready to embrace artificial intelligence more.

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” CEO Andy Jassy said in June.

When he made the comment, he had said that the company had more than 1,000 generative AI programs either in progress or built and it was only a “small fraction” of what the company had planned, The Associated Press reported.

Amazon has plans to build a campus in North Carolina that will cost about $10 billion to expand cloud computing and AI infrastructure. It also has data centers planned in Mississippi, Indiana and Ohio to meet the AI demand and to compete with other technology companies, according to the AP.

The 14,000 people losing their jobs are part of the corporate structure, who will have an opportunity to look for a new job within the company. For those who are unable to remain with Amazon, or who do not want to, they will get severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance and other assistance, Galetti said.

Reuters first divulged the layoffs on Monday in an exclusive report, which said that the layoffs would eventually hit 30,000.

Amazon has over 350,000 corporate employees, CNN reported, so the initial cuts represent about 5% of the overall corporate staff. In all it has about 1.56 million employees, the AP reported.

This is not the first time that the company has made a large number of cuts to its employees. In 2023, it got rid of 27,000 people from human resources, Amazon Stores, Amazon Web Services and other divisions, CNN reported. Jassy at the time blamed a worsening global economic outlook. Those cuts were made in phases; the first was 9,000 in March and then in May, another 18,000 people were let go, the AP reported.

© 2025 Cox Media Group