"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,"
"It's culture."
"If you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,"
"Sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions, the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,"
Amazon implemented 14,000 job cuts this week, primarily affecting middle managers, and attributed the reductions to cultural mismatch rather than financial necessity or immediate AI effects. A June memo had noted that AI-related "efficiency gains" would reduce staffing needs, and a separate memo referenced adapting to "transformative technology." Company headcount has grown to about 1.55 million employees, including roughly 350,000 corporate roles, up from 798,000 in December 2019. Rapid multi-year growth produced additional layers and locations, which can weaken ownership among front-line workers and slow or displace quick, front-line decision-making. Amazon joins other large firms in recent layoffs.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]