Inside Amazon’s Job Cuts: A Strategy Powering an AI Future

Amazon has confirmed plans to cut around 14,000 roles across its corporate division – a decision framed by leadership as a strategic reshaping of the business to seize opportunities in AI.

The BBC reported that Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President at Amazon, said in a note to employees that the company needed to be “organised more leanly” to ensure it could move at the pace required by emerging AI technologies.

“We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth said.

While the cuts will affect roughly 4% of Amazon’s estimated 350,000-strong corporate workforce, the company’s leadership has framed the move not as retrenchment but as reinvention. 

Beth told staff the changes would make Amazon “even stronger” by allowing it to “shift resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs”.

Amazon CEO’s vision for corporate culture

The decision underscores CEO Andy Jassy’s push to reshape Amazon’s corporate culture around efficiency, speed and technological agility. 

According to the Financial Times, Andy has sought to streamline layers of management to ensure the company operates “like the world’s largest startup”.

That philosophy is now being applied on a global scale as Amazon pours resources into AI and cloud infrastructure.

Amazon plans to invest as much as US$118bn in capital expenditures this year, largely directed toward building vast new data centres for AI. 

The company is also expanding facilities that will host hundreds of thousands of AI chips to support startup Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested US$8bn.

The Amazon CEO has been candid about how AI will reshape the company’s workforce, telling staff in June that technological progress would “reduce” corporate headcount in the years ahead. 

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he said, according to the BBC.

Analysts say the move reflects a broader industry shift. Ben Barringer, technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told the BBC that as AI tools advance “job losses are inevitable”, adding that big tech firms are “redistributing and restructuring their workforces accordingly.”

Building “the world’s largest startup”

Andy’s approach to leadership provides the blueprint for these changes.

In late 2024, he issued a memo to employees at the ecommerce giant that to operate like a startup, Amazon would “end its previous hybrid work policy” and require corporate staff to return to the office full-time. 

The move aimed to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers, improve innovation and deepen collaboration” by flattening the organisation and “empowering faster decision making.”

He added in the memo: “We want to work like the world’s largest startup,” explaining that this approach demands “a mix of constant invention, high ownership, strong urgency and shared commitment.”

Speaking at Amazon’s annual seller conference in Seattle in September 2025, the CEO emphasised the importance of removing red tape, saying: “I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organisations.

“As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”

In his 2024 shareholder letter, Andy added: “Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organise and remove structural barriers and build in modular ways that enable pace.

“But speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it.”

He concluded: “We operate like the world’s largest startup in large part because of our culture of Why. 

“We don’t always get everything right, and we learn and iterate like crazy. But, we’re constantly choosing to prioritise customers, delivery, invention, ownership, speed, scrappiness, curiosity and building a company that outlasts us all. It remains Day One.”