In its second round of mass layoffs since its CEO announced last year that artificial intelligence would reshape its workforce, Amazon announced Tuesday that it is cutting about 16,000 jobs.
As noted by CNN, the first cuts announced in late October trimmed about 14,000 jobs.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, announced the cuts on the company’s website. She said Amazon was “working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
Galetti said employees have 90 days to find a new job at Amazon, and that severance pay and other supports would be extended to workers getting the axe.
“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future. We’re still in the early stages of building every one of our businesses and there’s significant opportunity ahead,” she wrote.
CNN noted that Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees, making the cuts about 9 percent of its corporate workforce.
Amazon did not provide details of which jobs would be cut, but according to The New York Times, more cuts targeted software engineers than any other job category.
The report noted that most of Amazon’s 1,578,000 employees are hourly warehouse and operations workers who are not impacted by the cuts.
However, The New York Times noted, Amazon has floated plans to use robots to replace up to half a million jobs.
In its report on the job cuts, CNN noted that “Amazon is in stiff competition with Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI and a host of other technology companies that are battling to ramp up computing power and large language models that they believe will power the economy of the future.”
In October, Galetti posted 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 June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AI “should change the way our work is done.”
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he wrote then.
Last week, Mike Rowe warned that changes due to AI were going to hit some Americans harder than others, according to Fox Business.
“AI is coming for the coders. It’s not yet coming for the welders, and that basic understanding has taken root,” Rowe said.
In an interview, Rowe listed where workers are needed the most.
“The automotive industry needs over 100,000 skilled workers immediately… Larry Fink at BlackRock talks about four to 500,000 electricians needed in his portfolio of companies alone,” Rowe said. “The data center push, shipbuilding, the U.S. maritime industrial base is looking for 400,000 skilled workers alone. It goes way beyond just the construction industry.”
“Certainly nobody has a crystal ball, but it seems pretty clear, and I haven’t talked to anybody that disagrees with the idea that the category of jobs or the cohort of workers least likely to be disrupted by AI is going to be welders and electricians and steam fitters and pipe fitters, and energy workers and so forth,” Rowe said.
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