Amazon of job cuts, this time on a limited scale and mainly in its Stores, the business unit behind the company's main online store . The staff reductions came at a particularly symbolic moment, as they coincided with Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon's two-day shopping event on October 6 and 7.
The company confirmed that adjustments to the activity, but did not disclose the exact number of employees affected. According to information cited by Reuters, the number of redundancies in office positions was less than 1,000.
Which groups were affected?
The cuts were not limited to just one specialty. According to reports, teams related to customer service, independent seller support, and marketplace operations.
The latter category is particularly important for Amazon, as millions of products on the platform come from third-party sellers. Selling partner services teams act as an intermediary, helping partners manage sales, listings and various operational issues.
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Reports also suggest job cuts related to marketplace support and engineering. Employees in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom were reportedly affected, while in India the announcements coincided with the start of the Amazon Great Indian Festival.
Employees were informed during Prime Day
The news caused uproar among staff, with employees exchanging information via an internal Slack channel, which has nearly 37,000 members.
Amazon, for its part, said the changes were organizational changes to parts of its Stores business. A company spokesperson said the new structure is intended to allow the company to focus more on its core priorities.
The timing is particularly interesting. Prime Big Deal Days is a key commercial period for Amazon, which shows that staffing decisions are not necessarily tied to short-term sales trends, but more to how the company plans to operate in the coming years.
New round after major cuts
The latest layoffs come after a much larger wave of restructuring. Amazon had announced about 14,000 office job cuts in October 2022 and another about 16,000 in January, bringing the total to about 30,000 positions.
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Since then, the company has made smaller cuts in different units. This strategy reflects a general effort by large technology groups to reduce operating costs, increase productivity and direct more capital to areas with greater growth prospects.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezossaid in a recent interview that the company needs to further reduce staff. Bezos acknowledged that Amazon had significantly increased its workforce during the pandemic, when the explosive rise in online orders created a need for many more workers.
AI is changing priorities
Behind the cuts is a broader shift in priorities. Amazon is now investing huge sums in artificial intelligence infrastructure, data centers, specialized chips and cloud services.
CEO Andy Jassy has mentioned an investment plan that could reach $220 billion, with a significant portion of the funds going to AWS and the infrastructure needed to develop AI applications.
The picture is typical of today's technology market: companies are not just cutting costs, but are shifting resources from traditional activities to infrastructure they consider strategic for the next decade.
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Layoffs on the one hand, AI hiring on the other
Alongside the cuts, Amazon appears to be looking for experienced staff for areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and the cloud. It has also reached out to former employees, including people who left in previous layoffs.
The phenomenon isn't limited to Amazon. Other big tech companies are reshaping their workforces as AI changes the way they develop products and deliver services . HubSpot 's recent 660-job cut is another example of the trend.
Amazon has not yet said whether any new layoffs are imminent. However, the simultaneous reduction of staff in some activities and the aggressive increase in investment in AI indicate that the company is in a phase of deep restructuring, aiming for a leaner operation and greater concentration of resources on the technologies it believes will define the next phase of its growth.
