Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on massive layoffs: “It’s culture”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that 14,000 people laid off this week were simply not a cultural fit, noting that costs or artificial intelligence (AI) were not factors. “Not right now, at least,” he said.

In his first remarks following the announcement earlier this week of massive layoffs, Jassy hit back at reports that Amazon was cutting jobs as part of its automation efforts, saying it was a cultural push instead.

"The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least," Jassy said during an earnings call on Thursday, October 30th.

“It really – it’s culture,” he said, according to Business Insider, which first reported on the remarks. Jassy continued to say that Amazon’s rapid growth in recent years created “a lot more layers” that slowed down decisions.

Jassy’s previously expressed goal as Amazon’s chief executive is to build a more nimble organization that would operate like “the world’s largest startup.”

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s vice president of people experience and technology, announced the latest round of layoffs in a blog post on Tuesday, October 28th. She said that despite strong performance, the company will continue to “remove layers.”

She said AI was “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet” and allows companies to innovate “much faster than ever before.”

While some of the job cuts compensate for overhiring during the pandemic, leaked internal documents also show that Amazon is not slowing down its automation efforts, with many more positions likely to be eliminated as a result.

Jassy said in a company memo earlier this year that AI will shrink Amazon’s workforce, especially among white-collar employees.

The latest round of layoffs may affect more than 14,000 corporate roles, with as many as 30,000 positions potentially on the chopping block, according to sources cited by Reuters.

While this represents a fraction of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, it accounts for about 10% of its corporate workforce and would mark the retailer’s largest job reduction since late 2022, when 27,000 positions were eliminated.

These included senior engineers, who critics say are to blame for a recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.