Amazon announced plans to eliminate 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, according to an internal company report cited by Reuters. Although Amazon employs 1.5 million people, roughly 350,000 work in corporate roles, and the new layoffs would cut nearly ten percent of those corporate jobs.
The cuts would impact nearly every division or department of Amazon’s corporate structure, from human resources to Amazon Web Services. No specific reasons were given for the cutbacks. The cuts come after Amazon has already cleared thirty-five billion dollars in profits for the first half of 2025.
Amazon’s job slashing is part of a larger trend that has been growing in 2025. UPS has eliminated nearly 48,000 jobs this year, Target cut 1,800 corporate jobs, and technology companies, including Meta, have also been cutting jobs.
In the past, when companies increased their profits, they often hired more workers so they could continue to grow, but today the trend is reversed, and companies now tend to reduce their workforces when profits go up. That trend is making good-paying jobs more scarce despite increasing economic growth.
Amazon has pledged to spend 120 billion dollars on artificial intelligence (AI) programs, which includes the construction of enormous data centers that make AI programs work. Is AI to blame for the recent cutbacks in corporate America? As more companies integrate AI into their internal processes, it seems likely that those actions are translating directly into job losses for human workers. But the way it’s happening likely differs from the expectations of conventional wisdom.
Rather than AI replacing individual workers or jobs, the anticipation of how AI will be integrated into company processes is already altering the overall workflow on an enterprise level. AI is expected to create new corporate structures which have yet to emerge, and those new structures would require fewer workers. What’s remarkable is that Amazon appears to be cutting its workforce not because of what AI is already doing, but because of what they expect AI to do in the future.
