Amazon's 14,000 RIF. Here's the Email that Circulated Today
For a company with 1.54 million employees as of June 2025, a 14,000 RIF is not a large number in percentage terms, but it’s a lot of people in absolute terms. My guess is that much of this will come on the customer service rep (CSR) side of Amazon’s business.
Amazon’s (AMZN) AI service agents are quite good. I doubt much of the 14,000 cuts are on the software coding side, it’s early days for AI on the coding side despite what OpenAI, Anthropic and Google say publicly.
Amazon invested in warehouse robotic technology a few years ago, primarily through M&A, but I’m not sure how much operating leverage AMZN has achieved there.
This RIF is a margin protection move to offset the buildout of language models and related cloud services. I don’t know why Amazon doesn’t utilize the high quality opensource models that are available and instead focus on the technology stack and automation workflows that would sit on top of those opensource models.
The message below was shared with Amazon employees earlier today.
Written by Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon
“I want to let you know that we’re making organizational changes across Amazon that will impact some of our teammates. There will be communications from leaders to those teams and individuals today, but we also wanted to share the broader context about what’s happening and why.
Last year, Andy posted a note about strengthening our culture and teams – explaining how we want to operate like the world’s largest startup, the importance of having the right structure to drive that level of speed and ownership, and the need to be set up to invent, collaborate, be connected, and deliver the absolute best for customers. Many of you have put significant effort into that work of strengthening your organizations by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy. We’re already seeing the results, with teams moving faster and many Amazonians feeling more ownership, and the S-team and I appreciate all the work you’ve done. The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.
While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles. We’re working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted, including offering most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally (the timing will vary some based on local laws), and our recruiting teams will prioritize internal candidates to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon. For our teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we’ll offer them transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more.
Looking ahead to 2026, as Andy talked about earlier this year, we expect to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.
Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.
I don’t know of any other company with the breadth of Amazon, the number of exciting bold bets we’re making, and all the ways we can make customers lives better and easier around the world. I’m inspired by what I see across the company every day, and the S-team and I appreciate all that you do.
Beth”
This TEK2day Newsletter is also published on T2D Pulse. Pulse also resides on T2D Dash, along with Market data, an Economic calendar (courtesy of TradeView) and other T2D tools including CEORater and FinModel. Follow TEK2day on YouTube.