Amazon cutting 14,000 corporate roles
Amazon is significantly downsizing its corporate workforce.
A day after news reports indicated the online giant was planning to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees, Amazon announced it will eliminate approximately 14,000 corporate roles. The cuts were announced in a letter to employees from Beth Galetti, senior VP of people experience and technology at Amazon, which was posted on the company’s corporate blog. The letter said the layoffs are a continuation of an organizational effort to "operate like the world’s largest startup."
"The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs," Galetti said in the letter.
Galetti also said in the letter that this effort to operate more like a startup will include reducing headcount in some areas and hiring new employees in others. The company will provide most impacted employees 90 days to look for a new role internally, with recruiters prioritizing internal candidates, and transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits for affected workers who are unable or choose not to find a new role at Amazon.
These layoffs will represent close to 5% of Amazon’s roughly 350,000-person corporate workforce and are the largest workforce reduction in company history according to CNBC.
Departments at Amazon that would see roles reduced reportedly include HR, technology, devices and services, and operations, according to a report previously published in Reuters. In that same report, Reuters said Amazon seeks to reduce expenses and rectify increases in staffing levels it made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon may increase reliance on robots
These corporate layoffs follow recent media coverage of Amazon expecting that increasing usage of robots could enable to it replace more than 500,000 U.S. human employees and avoid having to bring on another 160,000 workers by 2027. Amazon has publicly denied those reports.
[READ MORE: Amazon reportedly plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots]
Amazon acknowledges AI impact
In her letter to employees, Galetti did not specifically mention robots, but did refer to the paradigm-shifting effect of new AI technologies on how companies operate.
"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 said in the letter. "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business."
In a June 2025 message to employees, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, said as Amazon rolls out more generative AI and agentic AI solutions, it should change the way the company performs its work.
"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," said Jassy in the message. "It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."
Amazon will hire 250K holiday workers, has been reducing staff
Amazon recently announced it plans to bring on 250,000 seasonal holiday workers for the third straight year. However, the company has been reducing corporate headcount for the past few years, most recently laying off roughly 200 employees from its North America stores group, which includes the Fashion and Fitness offering, in January 2025.
These actions have also included cutting hundreds of positions across several divisions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in April 2024, as well as reportedly reducing headcount by less than 5% at the unit responsible for its Buy with Prime service in January 2024.
That same month, the company eliminated several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organization, and also laid off "just over 500 people" across its Twitch gaming streaming platform.
Earlier layoffs include November 2023 reductions in Amazon’s Alexa workforce, as well as an April 2023 decision to eliminate positions in AWS in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica.
And in a March 2023 memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company intended to eliminate about 9,000 workers. At the beginning of 2023, Amazon said it planned to cut just over 18,000 roles in 2023, with the majority of cuts in its Amazon Stores and PXT organizations.
