Amazon is planning to cut 2,200 jobs in Washington, according to a state agency. According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) from the Washington Employment Security Department, Amazon plans the job separations to begin on April 28 across “various locations in Washington.”
The notification also states that 401 positions in the state will be lost due to the closure of one or more facilities.
This adds to the numerous layoffs that have already taken place in the company. The company had cut 14,000 global jobs last October, and also announced 16,000 corporate layoffs “to strengthen the organization by reducing layers.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy maintains that the decisions are not financially or AI-driven, but rather an effort to eliminate duplicate layers. “You can weaken the ownership of people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the 2-way door decisions,” Jassy said on the company’s third quarter earnings call in October.
READ: Amazon cuts 16,000 more jobs, bringing total layoffs to 30,000 (
“As a leadership team, we are committed to operating like the world’s largest start-up…and that means removing layers.” Jassy had reportedly eliminated more than 57K corporate positions across multiple rounds of layoffs since he became the CEO of Amazon in 2021.
While the Amazon layoffs aren’t directly linked to AI, a CNN report states they are tangentially related. Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experiences and technology at Amazon had said while announcing the October layoffs, that “AI is the “most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet.
She added that the company needs “fewer layers” to “move as quickly as possible.” Galetti had also said that “broad reductions every few months” are not part of Amazon’s plan.
READ: Amazon to invest over $35 billion in India on AI infrastructure (
Companies are likely shifting resources to areas like data, automation and analytics amid the AI race, according to Zeki Pagda, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School. “Amazon cannot easily retrain a workforce built for manual logistics or legacy retail systems into one that builds generative AI agents,” Pagda told CNN.
“One could argue this is Amazon’s leadership saying, ‘We’ve got to make these changes now because we see where the technology is headed and we see where the market is headed,’” Rob Siegel, lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told CNN.
Amazon brought in $180.2 billion in net sales in the September quarter alone last year and has a $2.5 trillion market capitalization.