Amazon cutting another 9,000 jobs, some of them could be replaced by AI

Amazon plans to lay off another 9,000 people in the coming weeks. Company CEO Andy Jassy announced this in a letter addressed to the employees.

This is the second wave of large-scale layoffs at the company. From November 2022 to January 2023, Amazon has already cut about 18,000 jobs. Most of the laid-off employees worked in recruitment and HR departments.

There are reports that the company intends to replace some of the workers in these departments with artificial intelligence (AI), which can determine which of the job seekers have the greatest potential for a given position and select them for the next round of interviews, without the supervision of a human expert.

As CNBC informs, employees of the cloud service and Twitch departments, as well as advertising and again HR departments will be laid off as part of the latest wave of layoffs.

According to Jassy, the company has grown its workforce significantly over the past few years, but today's volatile economic environment is forcing it to cut costs and jobs. As Jassy noted, now business should become more compact and invest only in long-term key projects.

In 2019, Amazon employed 798,000 people. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company began actively hiring new people, and the number of employees quickly increased to 1.6 million. However, after the pandemic, the company was forced to make massive layoffs.

Amazon has also frozen hiring, scaled back some experimental projects, and slowed the expansion of its warehouses.