Refocusing a Giant
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has addressed the company’s latest wave of layoffs – roughly 14,000 jobs across multiple divisions, insisting the move wasn’t about artificial intelligence replacing workers or a cost-cutting spree. Instead, he framed it as a cultural reset.
“It’s culture,” Jassy said during an internal town hall this week, according to sources familiar with the meeting. “When a company grows as fast as Amazon did, it’s easy to lose the mechanisms that made us great. This isn’t about saving money. It’s about sharpening focus.”
The comments mark Jassy’s clearest attempt yet to distinguish Amazon’s strategy from Silicon Valley peers like Google and Meta, both of which cited AI and automation as key reasons for workforce reductions.
A Shift Back to Amazon’s Roots
Since succeeding Jeff Bezos in 2021, Jassy has repeatedly emphasized a return to Amazon’s core ethos: operational discipline, accountability, and frugality, what Bezos once called a “Day One mindset.”
Insiders say the layoffs were part of a broader push to streamline overlapping teams, not eliminate talent for cost reasons. “There were too many layers, too many meetings, and too many people debating rather than building,” one senior Amazon manager told Millionaire MNL.
Jassy echoed this sentiment in his remarks: “We needed to make sure that every team is driving meaningful output. Amazon’s strength has always been small, empowered teams, not bureaucracy.”
AI’s Role: Tool, Not Threat
While many assumed that the layoffs were linked to AI integration, Jassy dismissed the notion that artificial intelligence had displaced workers.
“AI isn’t replacing people at Amazon, it’s helping them move faster,” he said. “We’re using it to remove friction, not eliminate humans. The layoffs were a structural correction, not an automation experiment.”
Amazon has been rapidly embedding AI across its businesses, from its Alexa division to AWS and logistics, but executives insist that the goal is augmentation, not substitution.
“The irony is that AI will create more opportunities here, not fewer,” Jassy said. “We’re hiring aggressively in AI engineering and cloud infrastructure because those are the engines for our next decade of growth.”
Cultural Drift and Course Correction
Jassy’s decision to link layoffs with culture rather than economics underscores a growing concern within Amazon’s leadership: that the company has become too slow, too corporate, and too risk-averse.
In recent years, Amazon expanded its workforce to nearly 1.6 million employees globally, with dozens of overlapping initiatives across entertainment, retail, and logistics. Insiders say many projects lacked clear ownership or alignment with the company’s mission.
“Andy is trying to reignite the scrappiness Amazon had 15 years ago,” said Patrick Vassallo, a former executive at AWS. “He doesn’t want Amazon to become another corporate giant weighed down by process.”
In his memo to staff earlier this year, Jassy wrote that teams needed to “move with urgency and operate like startups again.” That philosophy now appears to be shaping tough personnel decisions.
Wall Street Reaction: Stability Over Shock
Investors responded with cautious optimism. Amazon’s stock ticked 1.2% higher following the remarks, with analysts praising Jassy’s emphasis on long-term culture rather than short-term savings.
“Jassy is playing the long game,” said Colin Sebastian, senior analyst at Baird. “He’s framing these changes as cultural investments, pruning to grow stronger, rather than cost-driven layoffs, which gives investors confidence.”
Amazon’s recent financials support that narrative: the company posted $143 billion in quarterly revenue, up 11% year-over-year, with AWS contributing nearly 60% of operating profit.
Inside the Human Impact
Despite the strategic framing, the layoffs hit employees hard. Many affected workers took to LinkedIn to express frustration over what they viewed as a cultural contradiction: a company claiming to value innovation, while cutting those who helped build it.
“Amazon’s culture used to be about thinking big,” wrote one former Prime Video product manager. “Now it feels like thinking lean.”
Jassy acknowledged the pain but maintained that the company had to “course-correct to stay true to what made Amazon work.”
“Culture is not about how easy things are when business is booming,” he said. “It’s about what you do when growth slows, do you double down on clarity, or do you drift? We’re choosing clarity.”
The Path Forward: Smaller Teams, Bigger Ambitions
Under Jassy’s leadership, Amazon is prioritizing fewer, higher-impact bets, including AI-powered logistics, advertising expansion, and cloud innovation. The company’s restructuring aims to eliminate internal redundancy while rechanneling investment toward these fast-growing sectors.
“The next wave of Amazon’s growth won’t come from hiring more people,” Jassy told employees. “It’ll come from better alignment between our people and our purpose.”
That philosophy reflects a broader corporate shift across Big Tech: leaner, more focused, and more culturally intentional organizations after years of unrestrained hiring.
The Bottom Line
For Andy Jassy, Amazon’s 14,000 layoffs were never about numbers. They were about values.
“Culture,” he said, “isn’t something you talk about. It’s something you enforce. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
By turning layoffs into a statement about discipline and direction, Jassy is signaling that Amazon’s next era won’t be defined by cost-cutting or AI automation, but by a return to the principles that built one of the world’s most powerful companies.
