Amazon slashed 14,000 jobs this week — not to cut costs or chase AI, but because they didn’t fit the culture.
That’s according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who shared his thoughts about the layoffs for the first time during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday.
“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,” Jassy said, referring to the job cuts announced on Tuesday. “It really — it’s culture.”
Jassy’s remark aligns with his broader mission to reshape Amazon’s culture this year, which Business Insider chronicled. He is trying to raise performance standards, enforce discipline, and eliminate bureaucracy.
Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, announced the cuts on Tuesday in a blog post, explaining that despite the company’s strong performance, it is reducing jobs as a result of AI rapidly changing the world.
“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),” Galetti wrote.
Tuesday’s layoffs marked Amazon’s biggest job cut since it shed 27,000 positions in late 2022.
On Thursday’s call, Jassy said Amazon’s rapid growth in recent years created “a lot more layers” that have slowed decision-making. He emphasized that, with the ongoing AI transformation, there has never been a more critical time for the company to operate leaner and move faster.
“Sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work,” Jassy added. “And it can lead to slowing you down.”
Amazon isn’t the only Big Tech giant embracing the “Great Flattening.” Google and Microsoft have been trimming layers of managers too, aiming to move faster and shed corporate bloat.
Amazon also revealed that last quarter’s layoffs came with an estimated $1.8 billion in severance costs.
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