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Amazon is cutting nearly 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs in three months for the e-commerce company.
The tech giant is reducing its workforce, which has swelled during the pandemic.
Amazon senior vice president Beth Galetti said in a blog post Wednesday that the company is “doubling down, increasing ownership and eliminating bureaucracy.”
The company did not say what business units would be affected or where the job cuts would be. When reached by CBC News, a spokeswoman did not say how many workers in Canada would be affected by the layoffs.
The latest cuts follow Amazon’s layoffs of 14,000 workers in October. Some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, but others haven’t yet, Geletti said.
She said employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. She said severance pay, severance services and health insurance benefits will be provided to those who fail or do not seek new employment.
“As we make these changes, we will continue to hire and invest in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Geletti said.
On Tuesday, Amazon mistakenly sent an email to some Amazon Web Services employees calling its layoff plan “Project Down,” apparently upsetting thousands of employees.
The email, signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of operational AI solutions at AWS, incorrectly stated that affected employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been told they had lost their jobs.
“Such changes are difficult for everyone,” Aubrey wrote in an email reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and have been made thoughtfully as we position our company and AWS for future success.”
On Tuesday, Amazon cut jobs in its Fresh Grocery and Go Market divisions, planning to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some to Whole Foods stores. He did not disclose the number of injured workers.
Amazon has announced it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs, citing artificial intelligence as the most disruptive technology since the Internet. The retailer is the latest company to shed jobs as it invests heavily in AI.
AI must be ‘transformed’ into work, says the CEO
Galetti, war October blog post With the rise of artificial intelligence, the company needs to be organized “more lean” to adapt as quickly as possible. She indicated that there could be more job cuts in the future.
Wednesday’s announcement references Galetti’s previous post, but doesn’t mention artificial intelligence directly.
CEO Andy Jassy in June He wrote to the workers The company’s existing AI products and services were a “small fraction” of what it would eventually build.
“As we deploy more generative AI and agents, the way our work is done will have to change. We’ll need fewer people doing some jobs that are done today and more people doing other types of work,” he wrote.