It’s not you it’s AI, Amazon to cut 14,000 jobs and expect to cut more

Amazon said Tuesday it will cut about 14,000 corporate roles as it streamlines operations and reduces costs while ramping up investment in artificial intelligence.

The company employs around 1.56 million people globally, including about 350,000 in corporate roles.

The move follows a Reuters report that Amazon planned to eliminate as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, marking its largest round of layoffs since late 2022, when it began cutting around 27,000 positions.

Amazon has been reorganizing its business across several units, including books, devices, and its Wondery podcast arm. The latest reductions are expected to affect human resources, operations, devices and services, and Amazon Web Services, according to the report.

Wolfe Research analyst Shweta Khajuria said automation and retrofitting of Amazon’s fulfillment centers (FCs) will be key to improving efficiency and margins over the coming decade.

She forecasts “$2B/yr in savings from automation (3 pts of retail margin over 10 yrs) & $1B/yr from retrofitting FCs over 5 yrs.”

Khajuria added that automation should allow Amazon to avoid hiring roughly 400,000 additional fulfillment center employees, “implying $2B+ of annual savings by not adding headcount the co. would have otherwise added without automation.”

Wolfe raised its 2026 operating income estimates by 3.5% and maintained an Outperform rating with a $270 price target, saying Amazon’s “strong operational discipline and acute focus on unlocking incremental cost savings within the company’s retail business” should support long-term margin expansion.

CEO Andy Jassy said in June that generative AI adoption would likely lead to a smaller corporate workforce overtime as more functions are automated.