Amazon’s layoffs are staggering. We’ve seen this before

Source Domain: www.cnn.com

Big Tech continues to wrestle with mass layoffs, most recently with Amazon’s announcement to slash 16,000 jobs. It’s a trend that started long before the AI race: organizational change brought by the arrival of new technology.

Tech giants flourish or falter based on their decisions to overhaul themselves, often leaving tens of thousands of workers to pay the price. The 1990s and 2000s saw a wave of layoffs from industry stalwarts like IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, which embraced technological advancements like personal computers, mobile devices and the cloud.

Amazon’s staggering jobs cuts this week, the second wave since October, brings the commerce giant’s recent layoffs to roughly 9% of its corporate workforce.

While Amazon’s layoffs aren’t a direct result of AI, they’re tangentially related. Advancements in AI have sparked widespread concern about the future of jobs, as fellow tech giants Microsoft, Meta and Verizon all made layoffs last year.

AI is the “most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said when announcing layoffs in October. She added that the company needs “fewer layers” to “move as quickly as possible.”

In her memo explaining the new round of layoffs, Galetti wrote that Amazon aims to “strengthen” the organization by “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”

Companies are likely shifting resources to areas like data, automation and analytics amid the AI race, according to Zeki Pagda, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School.

“Amazon cannot easily retrain a workforce built for manual logistics or legacy retail systems into one that builds generative AI agents,”…

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