Editor's Note: Amazon confirmed Oct. 28 that it is planning to eliminate 14,000 corporate positions, and up to as many as 30,000, representing about 10% of its corporate workforce.
Amazon is reportedly preparing to cut up to 15% of its human resources staff in addition to conducting layoffs in other divisions as the company looks for ways to lower costs while investing aggressively in artificial intelligence.
Amazon's HR division — known internally as the People eXperience Technology (PXT) team — will be hit hard by the restructuring, according to reporting by Fortune citing multiple sources.
The PXT division numbers over 10,000 employees worldwide, including technology staff, a talent acquisition team, and other traditional HR roles.
Amazon has not confirmed these layoff plans.
Rebalancing Investment
Amazon's latest workforce reductions underscore its pivot toward AI and cloud infrastructure. The company plans to invest more than $100 billion this year in AI and data center expansion, redirecting resources from human staffing to advanced automation.
CEO Andy Jassy describes the shift as a strategic evolution, not a cost-cutting move, positioning AI integration as central to Amazon's long-term competitiveness and efficiency amid a broader industry trend toward technology-driven operations.
"Jassy has been clear — fewer people will be needed for current jobs as AI takes over," said Victor Soroka, founder and CEO of Select, a recruitment firm with locations in Ukraine. "One recruiter with AI can now handle what took five recruiters before. The math is simple and brutal."
Serana Huang, an AI expert and founder of Data with Serena, said that more companies will do the same. "Not because HR isn't important," she said, "but because the way companies do HR is being rewritten by AI and cost pressure."
The Amazon layoffs are part of an industrywide pattern, with Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce announcing tens of thousands of job cuts this year in favor of AI investments.
Amazon has already cut at least 27,000 corporate jobs since late 2022, and Jassy issued a stark warning to his workforce in June, when he said that AI will reduce the company’s corporate headcount in the coming years.
In a blog post shared internally and later made public, Jassy explained that as Amazon rolls out more generative AI and autonomous agents, the nature of work will shift significantly — automating certain tasks and diminishing the need for some roles.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” Jassy wrote, citing expected efficiency gains. He noted that AI will also create new kinds of roles, but the net effect will be a leaner corporate staff.
He encouraged workers to embrace the change, saying those who "become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company."
Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools, experiment, and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
While Amazon reduces corporate staffing, the company announced plans to hire 250,000 seasonal employees across its U.S. warehouse and logistics networks, illustrating the contrast between how automation and AI are primarily displacing knowledge workers rather than workers in physical warehouse operations.
The Bigger Picture
Evidence of AI-driven layoffs is growing across the economy, as business leaders are rethinking headcount strategies and pausing hiring in roles deemed vulnerable to automation. The IT sector, in particular, has seen a contraction in workforce numbers as AI adoption intensifies.
SHRM’s Jobs at Risk data brief found that 12.6% of U.S. jobs (over 19 million jobs) face high or very high risk of displacement due to automation, confirming the pressing need for reskilling initiatives tailored to vulnerable employee populations. The share of employment facing high or very high automation displacement risk reached nearly 20% in business and financial operations, including HR.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s not a directional signal of change, but it is not the end of HR,” said Nichol Bradford, executive in residence for AI+HI at SHRM.
Bradford has repeatedly said that experts believe AI will reduce the amount of specialization in HR, reversing a trend and resulting in more HR practitioners becoming high-level generalists.
“Software will do a lot of the things that specialists do today,” she said. “HR will tell you that they haven’t had time to do the strategic leadership coaching or career development or other things on the wish list that get pushed back because of day-to-day tasks.”
Bradford said that while AI is better at tasks, humans are still better equipped to be strategic partners to the business and help unlock people’s true potential.
“The survival skills of the future are adaptability and creative ideation,” she said. “And the leadership skills of the future are the ability to empower change and learning. If you focus there, it doesn’t matter what the machines can do.”
The AI + HI = ROI Approach
With industries and occupations increasingly affected by rapid AI advancements, SHRM is urging organizations to adopt its AI + HI = ROI strategy, which combines artificial intelligence with human intelligence to yield return on investment and build a resilient and adaptive workforce.
"Automation is no longer a hypothetical challenge; it is a present reality requiring thoughtful, strategic action from organizations," said Alex Alonso, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP, chief data and analytics officer at SHRM. “While automation has the potential to drive efficiency, businesses must pair it with human ingenuity to unlock true value. Our AI + HI = ROI strategy provides a road map for HR professionals to balance technology adoption with human capital investment to secure long-term organizational success."
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