Amazon cuts jobs, warning that workers could be replaced by AI

The online retail giant Amazon are planning to cut up to 30,000 jobs with the job losses expected to start this week.

This comes after Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, warned staff that roles within the company could be replaced by artificial intelligence systems.

Amazon conducted an extensive recruitment drive during the pandemic, and currently employs around 350,000 corporate staff. The proposed job cuts amount to close to 10% of those staff, comparable to previous cuts in 2022 when around 27,000 workers lost their jobs.

The corporate staff, however, are a small fraction of Amazon’s total workforce which numbers approximately 1.5 million across the world, most of whom work in their warehouses. Amazon employs about 75,000 people in the UK.

Amazon has been investing heavily in robotic technology to replace human staff in its warehouses. It believes that robots can do 75% of the work that humans do, and plans to use the technology to avoid hiring 600,000 workers.

Andy Jassy has warned the company that use of AI agents, autonomous systems and generative AI will leads to job losses. He said, “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done.”

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy continued, “in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”