Amazon’s “AI Efficiency” Blueprint Leaks the Worst Way Possible After an HR Email Escapes Drafts

If you’ve ever accidentally sent a naughty picture to your father in law (even though you swore you double checked the contact name)… then congrats, you, Jeff Bezos, and Andy Jassy finally have something in common.

Because somewhere inside Amazon, a layoffs email that was very much supposed to stay in Drafts decided to free itself.

And by “free itself,” I mean it landed in employee inboxes before anyone had actually been laid off.

The message (signed by an AWS exec) calmly informed employees that impacted workers in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica had already been notified they were out of a job. There was even a team-wide meeting invite to really marinate the panic.

Only problem? Nobody had been notified. And the meeting? Canceled almost immediately.

Rumor has it Amazon’s Slack channels registered a world record for most messages sent outside normal 9-to-5 hours… because of course the company with the fastest shipping times known to man found a new metric to dominate.

(Source: Yahoo News)

Soon after, reports confirmed the fear wasn’t imaginary. Amazon plans to start cutting thousands of corporate jobs this week, with teams across Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and HR all standing in the blast radius. The internal codename is reportedly “Project Dawn,” which is an interesting branding choice for something that feels a lot more like sunset.

Amazon hasn’t officially confirmed the cuts yet, but the math is ugly. The company already shallacked 14,000 roles in October and flagged a bigger plan to eliminate up to 30,000 corporate jobs. If that full number lands, it’s nearly 10% of Amazon’s white-collar workforce getting Thanos-snapped.

If you’re hunting for management’s explanation, save yourself the time… it’s AI. It’s always AI.

CEO Andy Jassy has been pretty open about the logic here. Generative AI lets Amazon move faster with fewer humans… which, not coincidentally, also means more margin and more money for Andy and friends.

(Source: Amazon)

HR chief Beth Galetti (who probably isn’t sleeping until at least Monday) jumped in to frame it as cutting bureaucracy and increasing speed… which sounds fantastic right up until you’re refreshing your inbox wondering if you were the bureaucracy.

Zoom out, though, and this isn’t some uniquely Amazon-flavored panic. From Microsoft to Google, Meta, and OpenAI, everyone’s locked in an arms race to pour obscene amounts of money into AI infrastructure. Efficiency isn’t optional anymore… it’s survival.

Ironically, it also seems like every company decided to announce layoffs at the exact same time. Nike. Pinterest. Amazon. Who’s up next? The White House?

Before we all assume AI is personally deleting the middle class, Vanguard poured a little cold water on the hysteria. Jobs most exposed to AI automation are still growing faster than they were pre-pandemic. So the apocalypse is postponed… at least for now.

Still, none of that makes it feel any better when you’re accidentally told you’re fired by an email that wasn’t supposed to exist yet.

Amazon says impacted employees will get 90 days to find internal roles, plus severance if they don’t land somewhere. That’s better than a Slack DM and a disabled badge swipe… but the damage is already done.

And for the employees who still have Slack access by the end of the week? I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume this probably isn’t shaping up to be a big culture-building moment.

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