“Alexa, fire everyone.” -Andy Jassy

Amazon (+2.4%) just announced a new “efficiency initiative”... which is ALWAYS code for “pack up your things and leave your keycard on the desk…”

Starting today, the ecom monopoly will begin trimming shellacking as many as 30,000 corporate jobs (roughly 10% of its white-collar workforce) marking one of its biggest layoffs in company history.

CEO Andy Jassy says it’s all part of his plan to “reduce bureaucracy,” which apparently means fewer managers and more AI doing their jobs. He even set up an anonymous complaint line to root out inefficiencies… Because nothing shows your focus on “efficiency” quite like reading 1,500 emails about inefficiency.

(Source: CNBC)

This new round follows Amazon’s 27,000-person layoff spree in 2022, which hit every corner of the company. This time, HR, operations, devices, AWS, and probably whoever is running the Prime Video department… are all getting that dreaded email invite to an “urgent” Zoom call.

This comes after Amazon’s HR commander and chief Beth Galetti, called AI “the most transformative technology since the internet” and that the company “needs to be organized more leanly.” which is a nice way to say “Grok’s doing your job now, Amanda.”

Jassy’s been laying the groundwork for months. In an internal memo titled “Some Thoughts on Generative AI” (which really should’ve been called “Some Thoughts on Your Job Security”) he warned that as AI spreads across the company, “we’ll need fewer people doing some of the jobs being done today.” Apparently “some” meant about 30,000.

Meanwhile, AWS, Amazon’s profit engine, posted $30.9B in Q2 sales… decent, until you realize Microsoft’s Azure is growing at 39% while AWS limps along at 17.5%. Oh, and AWS also had a 15-hour outage last week that knocked out Snapchat and Venmo. So yeah, maybe keep a few humans on standby next time, Andy.

Don’t let the pink slips fool you… Bezos isn’t broke. Amazon’s market cap is sitting pretty above $2.4 trillion, and the company’s hiring 250,000 seasonal workers for the holidays. But like the rest of Big Tech, they’ve done the math: why pay 10 engineers $200K each when you can pay 2… and leverage AI to do the work of the other eight?

And when one of your moneymakers is struggling (cough AWS), the best way to appease shareholders is to hand out pink slips. It’s a tale as old as time.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon, Microsoft, and Snap as mentioned in the article.