Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has warned corporate employees that the company expects to reduce its white-collar workforce in the coming years due to the growing impact of artificial intelligence. The announcement, first reported in a company-wide memo obtained by the Financial Times, marks one of the clearest signals yet that AI adoption is poised to trigger significant job losses across the tech industry.
Jassy told staff on Tuesday that Amazon is accelerating the integration of AI across its operations, particularly in its vast logistics and supply chain networks, as part of an ongoing push to lower costs and increase efficiency. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
The memo underscores growing pressure on Amazon and other tech giants to show returns on their massive investments in AI. The company has pledged to invest around $100 billion this fiscal year, with a large portion going toward AI infrastructure, including development and data centers supporting its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS). As it races against rivals like Google and Microsoft to capitalize on the AI boom, Amazon has already made major workforce cuts — eliminating 27,000 jobs in two rounds of layoffs in 2023 and slashing additional roles at AWS in 2024.
Jassy’s direct acknowledgment of AI-driven redundancies contrasts with the cautious tone typically struck by other tech leaders. While many in the industry have praised AI’s potential to boost productivity and innovation, few have publicly linked it to downsizing. Microsoft, for example, laid off 3 percent of its global workforce in May — a move that disproportionately affected software engineers — but maintained that the cuts were not directly caused by AI. Nevertheless, CEO Satya Nadella has openly discussed AI’s growing role in software development, stating in a conversation with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg that as much as 30 percent of Microsoft’s internal codebase could now be written by AI.
For Amazon, the internal warning comes amid broader challenges, including weaker stock performance — its shares are down about 2.5 percent this year — and external political uncertainty, particularly around the prospect of renewed trade tensions under a possible second Trump administration. Jassy has also been leading a broader structural overhaul aimed at eliminating bureaucracy and flattening management layers, further pressuring the company’s traditional workforce model.
While Amazon has not specified which departments or roles will be most affected by AI, the memo suggests the company is bracing for a major shift in its corporate labor structure — one that could reshape the future of white-collar work in the tech sector.
