Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, commented on the recent announcement of layoffs affecting approximately 14,000 employees during the conference call on the company's third-quarter 2025 results. According to him, the decision has nothing to do with financial problems or artificial intelligence, at least not at this time. Instead, Jassy emphasized that it is primarily about corporate culture. The company has grown so rapidly in recent years that the number of employees, locations, types of business, and especially layers of management has increased. According to him, this weakened the accountability of the people doing the actual work and slowed down the entire process.
Jassy explained that rapid growth brought many people and greater complexity into the company, making decision-making more difficult. The goal of the layoffs is to restore Amazon's speed and the feeling of being the world's largest startup. This approach is intended to help the company respond more quickly to changes taking place in the technology world. Before the pandemic, Amazon had around 650,000 employees, but during its expansion, that figure climbed to 1.6 million, including seasonal workers.
Layoff Announcement and Beth Galetti's Role
The layoffs were announced by Beth Galetti, Amazon's Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, in a blog post dated October 28, 2025. She explained that the company is making organizational changes that will affect some employees. Specifically, it is reducing the number of corporate roles by approximately 14,000, representing around 4% of Amazon's total corporate workforce of about 350,000 people. Galetti noted that while some areas will be reduced, others will continue hiring, but the overall result will be a smaller workforce.
In the same post, Galetti described artificial intelligence as the most transformative technology since the internet. According to her, it enables companies to innovate faster than ever before, which is why Amazon needs to become leaner, with fewer layers and greater accountability. This is intended to help the company move faster for customers and the business. However, during the call, Jassy downplayed these references to AI and reiterated that the current layoffs are not about that.
Details from Internal Communications
Tapas Roy, Amazon's Vice President of Software and Services Devices, sent a company-wide email this week announcing role reductions in the OS & Services team. He urged the remaining employees to focus on artificial intelligence. This email underscores that even though Jassy denies a direct connection to AI, internal messages suggest that the company is focusing on it as a key element of its future.
The layoffs mainly affect middle management, including positions at the Seattle headquarters, distribution centers, and among remote workers. This is the largest wave of layoffs since 2022, when Amazon eliminated 27,000 positions. Over the past three years, the company has gradually reduced its workforce to return to a more efficient structure.
Amazon's Financial Results in Context
Despite the layoffs, Amazon reported revenue of $180.2 billion (approximately CZK 4.2 trillion) for the third quarter of 2025, an increase of 13% compared with the same period last year. Its AWS cloud division grew by 20% to $33 billion (about CZK 769 billion). The company's shares jumped 13% in after-hours trading following the earnings announcement. Jassy said the company had added more than 3.8 gigawatts of capacity for AI and cloud infrastructure over the past 12 months and plans to add another gigawatt this quarter.
These figures show that the layoffs really are not about money, as Jassy claims. Instead, they are an effort to keep the company agile at a time when the technology world is changing rapidly. In 2022, Amazon laid off 10,000 employees in its corporate divisions, which at the time represented about 3% of that part of its workforce.
Comparison with Previous Layoffs
The layoffs in 2022 were part of a broader wave in the technology sector, as companies adjusted their post-pandemic growth. At the time, Amazon reduced its workforce by 27,000, which was more than the current reduction. Jassy previously said that AI would mean the company would not need to hire as many people, but he denies that connection in the current context. According to internal documents leaked to the New York Times, Amazon's robotics team plans to automate 75% of operations by 2027, which could eliminate the need to hire more than 160,000 workers in the US.
Amazon employs approximately 1.55 million people in total, mostly in blue-collar roles such as warehouse workers. The layoffs primarily affect white-collar employees, but future changes could also impact other areas. The company is trying to return to the level of efficiency it had before its massive expansion during the pandemic.
Sources: timesofindia.indiatimes.com and axios.com
