Amazon announced on Tuesday the 28th of October that they will be cutting approximately 14,000 jobs from their corporate workforce in the race to incorporate AI technologies. CEO Andy Jassy asserts that such cuts would increase the business’ efficiency while reducing bureaucracy. These actions also counteract an aggressive surge in hiring during the pandemic to meet the growing demand for cloud computing and e-commerce. 

Economic uncertainty over tariffs has become a contentious point for many businesses, with many favoring more conserved spending to reduce potential losses. Along with that, major corporations have begun to integrate AI into their business processes, with fear of falling behind their competitors. Amazon has invested significantly in AI development, their most recent being a five million dollar investment in South Korea to build new artificial intelligence data centers just last week in addition to four $10 billion investments to build data centers in North Carolina, Mississippi, Indiana and Ohio. 

The Amazon layoffs follow a trend of massive corporate cleansings: Meta laid off 600 AI workers, Microsoft cut nearly 15,000 staffers, and Google dealt a number of its white collar workforce the pink slip. However, Amazon still intends on hiring “250,000 seasonal workers to meet demand for the holiday shopping season.”