According to Reuters and others, the Amazon is about to launch its largest downsizing programme in history, affecting almost all operational sectors.The Amazon states that this is part of its “organizational restructuring” and is intended to “be stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, simplifying tiers and reallocating resources to ensure our input into the most important areas and the current and future needs of clients”.
In a statement issued by the Network of Corporate Officials, the Senior Vice-President of the Amazonian Experience and Technology Department, Beth Galleti, stated that, while the realignment “would cut some areas and recruit others”, it would eventually lead to “a reduction in the number of corporate jobs by about 14,000”. Although the scope of the reduction was not specified in the statement, Reuters reported that it would affect a number of business sectors, including human resources, operations, equipment and services and Amazon cloud services. It is worth mentioning that the Amazon cloud service has recently been disrupted by a third of the world ‘ s network services due to failures, affecting platforms such as Fort Night, Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation.
According to Bloomberg’s report, the Amazon game business will also be affected by redundancies, with “large job cuts” in the Gulf and Santiago offices and “reduced efforts to develop high-input games, especially in the area of large multi-person online games”. Most of the employees at risk of abolition have 90 days to find new jobs in-house, and those who are unable to move in-house will receive “remobilization, re-employment services, medical insurance benefits, etc.”. Beth Galleti highlighted AI as one of the most transformative innovations and was driving firms to innovate at a much faster rate than before. “It may be asked why companies continue to be laid off when they perform well. Indeed, all of our business is providing an excellent client experience on a daily basis, maintaining rapid innovation and strong performance.” Beth Galleti explained: “But it must be recognized that the world is changing rapidly. This generation of artificial intelligence is the most transformative innovation since the advent of the Internet, enabling enterprises to innovate at an unprecedented rate (whether in existing markets or in new areas). We strongly believe that a more streamlined organizational structure, with fewer layers and a greater sense of responsibility, is necessary to achieve the fastest response for clients and operations.”
According to Reuters, the Amazon CEO Andy Jassi is working on “Elimination of redundancies.”