Amazon's recent layoffs are due to a pletra of different objectives, paradigms and anticipated risks. Sure, AI can do many things but it cannot compare to expert human critical thinking, something needed to guide process and technology. While humans do gatekeep, and bloat bureaucracy, this is important when running a MNC. In other words, they can transfer blame from people to technology, allowing them to navigate ethical quagmires. Amazon, like other corporations, is only interested in making money and their rhetoric is to mitigate bad publicity, with no sincere intention in social justice or other causes. I think that they will try to automate everything they can and then react appropriately when things go wrong.
Principal, I/O Psychologist, and Assessment Developer at SalesDrive, LLC
Answered 6 months ago
I like to think about the strategic decisions that organizations make behind closed doors... and when a company is chopping 14,000+ corporate positions as part of a "cultural reset", you can be sure that it's an indicator of more than just regulatory fat trimming. In fact, I would suggest that this is a subtle announcement of something that we are going to see a lot more of in the near future: companies flattening their middle management to prepare for AI-augmented execution. In other words, the various strata of people who approved, edited, routed, and ultimately signed things off on? Yeah, they're gone. Machine tools don't require three levels of feedback to release a product page or print a logistics summary report. This is more than a restructuring... it's a re-framing of the value of certain white collar roles. So when you begin to see phrases like "flattening" or "agility," the implied meaning is starting to sound a lot like "we are automating away certain decision cycles." To be fair, I'm willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt here and think they mean what they say. Calling it cultural housekeeping detracts from the real shakeup: high-throughput, low-friction teams operating atop AI-infused utilities. Perhaps that is fewer PMs writing memos across silos and more ICs shipping deliverables direct with far fewer approvals. Long story short, I wouldn't call this a "reset". I'd call it a reorg for a company that's been making plans to let the machines hold the middle. That says a lot.
I think the euphemism sounds louder than the actual act. Laying off 10 to 30K corporate jobs while branding it as a culture reset is just a watered-down way to say, "AI will now do your work cheaper, faster, and without PTO." All I'm saying is, you do not cut legal, HR, and retail functions unless you plan on displacing knowledge work with robotic process. Internal bureaucracy is not the limiting constraint. Execution is. If 30K employees were the bottleneck, then that is a staffing problem, not a culture problem. Now to be fair, a good portion of this is simple math. Assume each eliminated job cost $120k/year with comp. Eliminating 20K saves $2.4 billion in direct costs per annum. You would need 24,000 $100K AI licenses to reach that sum, unlikely given most tools cost under $5K/seat. This is less agility and more capex substitution. So I would not call it a culture reset. I would call it a silent recalibration and cloaked in a focus-grouped memo.
I think it's both. Companies are not going to say "AI replaced people" even when it partially did. They'll frame it as culture reset because that feels less violent to the narrative. When we were scaling SourcingXpro in Shenzhen and moved to 5 percent commission and automated a big chunk of supplier follow up flow, it cut around 27 percent of admin load instantly. We didn't fire anyone, but the shape of roles changed fast. Corporate will do the same at scale. AI becomes the new quiet baseline, and then they reorganize around what gaps are left. So it's restructuring with smoother language.
I believe what Amazon is doing is the future and will probably be copied by everyone else. Because one way or another, things are going to be automated, and most people who got sacked are from customer support and similar roles. This is easily solved by AI as most problems are the same, and if something extra happens, you can still use human force behind it. I think this will spread to other departments soon. The "cultural reset" language is just PR to avoid saying "we're replacing you with AI." Nobody fires a lot of people to reduce bureaucracy - you fire middle management for that, not entire departments. What is really happening is they have realized AI can handle a lot of these jobs adequately, and they only need humans for the remaining complex.