Amazon CEO Now Says AI Is Not Responsible for Recent Layoffs

Amazon posted its third-quarter earnings and it appears that despite the recent layoffs, it was a remarkable quarter for the e-commerce giant.

The company giant posted sales of $180.2 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30, up 13% from the same period last year. Its cloud business, AWS, reported its biggest year-over-year growth since 2022, rising 20% ​​to $33 billion. The company’s stock even popped 13% in after-hours trading after the report.

So why, with the company performing so well, did Amazon fix it? 14,000 corporate job cuts And hinted that more cuts may be on the way?

Fortunately for us, CEO Andy Jassy was asked to comment on the layoffs during the company’s earnings call Thursday evening. However, he was quick to downplay any connection to AI.

“What I will tell you is, you know, the announcement that we made a couple of days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not really AI driven, at least not right now,” Jacy told investors. “It’s culture.”

He continues to make the case that the company’s rapid growth over the past several years has added more people, layers and complexity to its operations. This rapid growth, in turn, slows down decision-making and weakens worker ownership on the frontline.

Jacey said Amazon is committed to acting like the world’s largest startup now that he’s leading the “technological transformation happening right now.”

D Memo Jassy made many of the same points that sent laid off employees earlier this week. But it directly named the big technological shift, AI, that he alluded to, even as he claimed it wasn’t driving this round of layoffs.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it enables companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and entirely new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be more organized, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers,” wrote Galetti’s senior people and experience for senior technology people. Amazon, in the memo.

Still, these job cuts also come as Amazon, and the rest of Silicon Valley, are seemingly betting on AI.

Jassy said Thursday that the company’s AI and cloud infrastructure has added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power over the past 12 months and expects to add more gigawatts this fourth quarter.

And future cuts may not be limited to corporate employees. The New York Times reported last week that Amazon’s automation team expects that by 2027, the company will Avoid hiring more than the 160,000 US workers that would normally be required. Overall, Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal of automating 75 percent of the company’s operations, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.