Amazon is cutting 14,000 white collar jobs even as sales and profits climb. The company insists this wave of layoffs is not about money or artificial intelligence. Instead, CEO Andy Jassy says the decision comes down to one word, culture.
For thousands of people whose badges will soon stop working, that raises a simple question that hits much closer to home, what does culture mean when your paycheck disappears?
In late October 2025, senior vice president Beth Galetti told employees that the company would eliminate roughly 14,000 corporate roles as part of a broad reorganization.
In a memo later posted on the company site, she framed the cuts as an effort to reduce layers, remove bureaucracy, and shift resources toward Amazon priorities that matter most for current and future customers.
She also acknowledged that the business is performing well but argued that rapid advances in generative AI mean the organization needs to be leaner and faster to keep up.
On the following earnings call, Jassy sharpened that explanation. He told analysts that the announcement was not really financially driven and not even driven by AI, at least for now, and summarized the move as a cultural choice.
He described a company that had grown quickly across people, locations, and product lines, picking up extra management layers along the way that slowed decisions and diluted ownership among the people doing the day-to-day work.
To restore that sense of speed, Jassy says he wants Amazon to operate like what he calls the world’s largest startup. According to the same results, the company recently reported about 1.55 million employees worldwide, including roughly 350,000 people in corporate roles.
In the quarter that included these layoffs, Amazon booked an estimated $1.8 billion in severance costs while still delivering $180.2 billion in revenue and $21 billion in profit, an increase of about thirteen percent compared with the year before.
Culture as a reason for mass layoffs
Amazon is not the only tech giant using cultural language while cutting jobs. Across Big Tech, companies like Microsoft and Meta have trimmed thousands of roles while boosting spending on AI infrastructure and software.
Reporting on the most recent 16,000 job cuts at Amazon describes them as a new phase in a broader cultural reset focused on reducing bureaucracy, shrinking management ranks, and pushing more responsibility toward teams that ship products.
For workers sitting in open-plan offices or on video calls, this Great Flattening can feel very different from the slide decks. Removing layers means fewer managers, fewer program leads, and fewer people in the sorts of roles that once looked relatively insulated from downturns. The spreadsheets may show a more agile organization.
The lived experience is an email that lands on a weekday morning and says your position is gone.
Where AI fits in
Inside Amazon’s own narrative, AI is both backdrop and destination. Galetti’s memo calls this generation of AI the most transformative technology since the commercial Internet and argues that the company needs a lean structure with fewer layers in order to move quickly enough in that environment.
Independent analyses point out that Amazon is ramping up capital spending on data centers and AI products and that trimming corporate staff helps free cash and management attention for these long-term bets.
In other words, AI may not be the immediate cause of a specific layoff notice, but it shapes the strategic map that decides which jobs feel safe and which ones suddenly look like overhead. That is why so many of these restructuring plans mention cultural change, efficiency, and AI progress in the same breath.
What it means for workers
For white collar employees, the message is sobering. Job security depends less on whether a company is profitable and more on whether a role fits the latest vision of a lean, AI-enabled organization.
Efficiency drives, cultural resets, and automation projects tend to point in the same direction, fewer traditional office roles and more jobs that sit closer to data centers, cloud platforms, and machine learning products. For many families, that shows up not as strategy but as anxiety over the next rent payment or the health insurance bill.
At the end of the day, Amazon insists this round of layoffs is about how the company feels and functions on the inside rather than an immediate AI takeover. For the people whose jobs disappear, culture will still be measured in paychecks, severance, and how long it takes to land what comes next.
The official statement about the 14,000 role reduction was published on About Amazon.
