Layoff news: Amazon to slash 15% HR roles, others in new round of job cuts, says report
Amazon layoff news: According to Fortune, citing sources, e-commerce and technology giant Amazon will cut up to 15 percent, as well as some other roles in the human resources department, with a new round of layoffs.
Amazon’s human resources division, known internally as the PXT or People eXperience Technology team, will be hit hard, but other areas of Amazon’s core consumer business will also likely be affected, two sources told Fortune. It was not possible to learn how many employees in total Amazon plans to lay off and the exact timing of the cuts.
The company laid off a relatively small number of employees earlier this year in areas such as its consumer devices unit, Wondery podcast division and Amazon Web Services.
Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel declined to comment.
The PXT division, which reports to Amazon senior vice president Beth Galetti, has more than 10,000 employees worldwide and includes a large recruiting team as well as technology staff and other traditional HR roles.
The new cuts come as Amazon continues to look for ways to cut employee costs while aggressively investing in AI products and infrastructure for both internal use and sales to enterprise customers. The company said it plans to spend more than $100 billion on capital expenditures this year as it builds out its cloud and AI data centers.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has already overseen the largest layoffs in company history from late 2022 through 2023, when the company cut at least 27,000 corporate jobs; this accounted for a high-single-digit percentage of the company’s office work. Many other Big Tech companies also reduced headcount during that period as the pandemic subsided and consumer demand trends changed.
Many employers are now looking to harness the power of AI to reduce the need to keep the same level of human staff on their payroll, initially for mundane and repetitive tasks and eventually for more complex work.
Jassy himself is one of them. The CEO fired a bit of a warning shot at his own employees in June as he encouraged them to welcome this new AI-powered era.
“Those who embrace this change, become AI-savvy, and help us develop our AI capabilities internally and deliver them to our customers will be high impact and well-positioned to help us reinvent the company,” he wrote in a companywide email that was also posted on Amazon’s corporate blog.
At the same time, Jassy also noted that there won’t be room for everyone on the bus: “We expect this to reduce our total corporate workforce as we see efficiency gains from using AI widely across the company.”
Jassy, who replaced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the CEO position in 2021, has earned a reputation as a cost-cutter (though, to be fair, he inherited a company that many say has become wasteful and bloated in some areas). Amazon executives regularly demand that managers meet a certain percentage target for no-regret attrition, or URA; This is essentially the percentage of employees that the company wouldn’t mind losing, whether through voluntary departures, “management,” or formal layoffs. But sources told Fortune that these cuts were discussed internally differently than the typical URA process.
As Amazon plans layoffs of corporate roles, the company on Tuesday announced its warehouse staff’s typical holiday hiring spree. This year, the company will hire 250,000 seasonal workers across its U.S. warehouse and logistics networks.
Amazon’s stock price is down just over 1% this calendar year, but remains 15% higher than it was 12 months ago. The company will announce earnings later this month.
