Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will be laying off 14,000 corporate roles in order to strengthen company culture and customer service amid competition faced by increased use of artificial intelligence in the corporate world.
Senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, Beth Galetti, wrote a release discussing the matter, emphasizing the trend of technology changes.
“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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 noted. We’re convinced 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.”
Galetti also stressed “the importance of having the right structure to drive that level of speed and ownership, and the need to be set up to invent, collaborate, be connected, and deliver the absolute best for customers.”
The layoffs were anticipated by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in July, who seeks to make the company operate like the “world’s largest startup.”
Staff members whose jobs are safe are being requested to use artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, according to another memo from Amazon’s vice president of device software and services, Tapas Roy, sent to staff on its Slack network.
To increase company efficiency, several major companies are laying off large numbers of corporate roles. Target similarly laid off nearly 2,000 of its staff in the past week.
