Inside Amazon's Job Cuts: Restructuring for a New Culture

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has discussed the thousands of job cuts announced across the business, stating the motive is not based on financial grounds. 

Considering the topic at Amazon’s quarter earnings call on 30 October 2024, Andy said: “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI driven, not right now.” 

Instead, he laid out the decision behind the 14,000 corporate job cuts, explaining that “it’s culture.”

Andy said Amazon’s headcount growth in past years has consequences for Amazon’s structure. 

“You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” he explained. 

“Sometimes without realising it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions.”

Restructuring for ownership and speed

The job cuts, set to affect 4% of Amazon’s corporate workforce, were announced on 29 October 2024, framed by Amazon as a key step towards reinvention. 

According to the BBC, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President at Amazon, said in a note to employees: “We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.” 

She said that the changes will make the multinational tech company “even stronger” by allowing it to “reallocate resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

Andy has been outspoken about his approach towards adjusting management layers to ensure Amazon operates like “the world’s largest startup”. 

In late 2024, he issued a memo to employees saying that to operate like a startup, Amazon will “end its previous hybrid work policy” requiring corporate staff to return to the office full-time.

Leadership and cultural change

Andy says that this approach demands “a mix of constant invention, high ownership, strong urgency and shared commitment” and aims to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers, improve innovation and deepen collaboration” by flattening Amazon. 

This connects the physical workplace environment to a desired cultural outcome of agility and innovation.

In a 2024 letter to shareholders, Andy discussed the topic of change, saying: “Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it's a priority, reinforce it constantly, organise and remove structural barriers and build in modular ways that enable pace. But speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it.”

Differing rationales for job cuts

According to a report by CNN, Amazon has said the layoffs are more about staying “nimble” in anticipation of future AI efficiencies. 

The company is not alone in reducing its workforce, with other large businesses laying off thousands of workers in past months including Salesforce, Paramount and Target for a variety of reasons. 

UPS announced on 28 October 2024 during its Q3 earnings announcement that it has plans to reduce its workforce by tens of thousands as part of its strategy to improve efficiency through increased automation. 

Discussing the changes, UPS Chief Executive Officer Carol B. Tomé said: “We are executing the biggest strategic change in direction in UPS’s history, and the changes we are implementing are designed to deliver long-term value for all stakeholders.”

Salesforce reduced its customer support workforce, cutting 4,000 jobs in 2025 as AI takes on a larger share of customer service. 

CEO Marc Benioff said on The Logan Bartlett Show: “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. From 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.” 

He said that half of customer service enquiries are now handled by AI. These differing approaches to workforce reduction could indicate a wider trend of businesses reassessing their structures and technology stacks.