Amazon lays off 16,000 employees! From the expansion and correction of the epidemic, AI is reshaping the global enterprise architecture

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Amazon announced the layoff of 1.6 employees, with a total of 3 jobs in half a year. CEO Jassy once said that the popularity of AI tools will bring more automation, and companies only need less manpower to perform existing tasks.

Amazon laid off 1.6 employees, with a total of 3 layoffs in half a year

Amazon confirmed that it will cut about 16,000 administrative and corporate positions, marking the second wave of large-scale personnel reductions since October last year.

If you count the two layoffs in the past six months, Amazon has lost about 30,000 jobs. Although it accounts for only a small part of the world’s 158 employees, according to a Reuters analysis, this wave of layoffs is mainly concentrated on the corporate side, accounting for about 10% of its administrative and technical workforce, and the scale is the largest in the company’s 30 years of establishment.

Beth Galetti, senior vice president of human resources at Amazon, revealed that the layoffs are aimed at strengthening the organization’s structure, with specific strategies including reducing management levels, increasing responsibilities, and eliminating bureaucracy.

Although Galetti said that Amazon does not intend to establish a new rhythm of mass layoffs every few months,However, she also mentioned with reservations that each team will continue to assess manpower needs and make adjustments at appropriate times, and does not completely rule out the possibility of further reductions in the future.

Amazon sent a mistaken letter before the announcement, accidentally revealing the “Dawn Project”

In fact, before Amazon officially issued the announcement, an email that was supposed to be sent to affected employees was mistakenly sent to some employees of Amazon Cloud Computing Service (AWS) due to human error.

The letter referred to the layoffs as Project Dawn and falsely claimed that affected employees in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica were aware of it, which once caused panic and confusion among thousands of Amazon employees.

Although Amazon has not disclosed the list of laid-off units, based on foreign media reports and employee reactions on the Internet, the layoffs may involve Kindle e-books, voice assistant Alexa, Prime Video streaming video, hardware devices, advertising business, and the team responsible for last-mile delivery.

During the new crown epidemic in previous years,Amazon has expanded in response to market demand, and now it is trying to “correct” from overexpansion while shutting down physical businesses that are not performing as expected, such as Fresh supermarket and Go unmanned store, to centralize human resources.

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Source: commons.wikimedia, Brianc333a Photography Amazon has closed Amazon Fresh and Go stores across the United States

AI drives workplace transformation, and Amazon is committed to becoming the world’s largest startup

Amazon’s layoffs also profoundly reflect how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology are reshaping the workforce structure of large enterprises.

As AI assistants become more efficient and accurate in handling daily administrative tasks and even complex programming, the demand pattern for human resources is changing.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has publicly stated,The popularity of AI tools will bring more automation, requiring fewer manpower to perform existing tasks, which will lead to the loss of some jobs.

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Source: Flickr, JD Lasca Photography Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Jassy has recently been working to reshape Amazon’s corporate culture, with the goal of allowing the giant tech giant to operate as agilely as the world’s largest startup.

In addition to cutting management levels, Amazon also continues to introduce robotics technology on the warehousing and logistics side to speed up packaging and distribution and reduce dependence on labor.And the saved costs are redirected to generative AI and data center construction.

Perhaps, the future workplace will be one where fewer people are doing today’s jobs and more people are turning to new types of jobs. And this AI-driven efficiency revolution is being staged within Amazon.

Further reading:
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