Amazon cuts its workforce by 14,000 in further embrace of AI (www.engadget.com)

Amazon is cutting roughly 14,000 corporate jobs as it reorganizes around AI, after earlier reports that as many as 30,000 positions might be impacted. The figure is somewhat softened by simultaneous planned hirings, so net headcount change is unclear. Bloomberg and other outlets say affected teams include video games, logistics, payments and cloud-computing groups such as Prime Video and AWS. Amazon’s SVP of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, framed the move as a response to “this generation of AI” being the most transformative technology since the internet, requiring a leaner organization with fewer layers to move faster for customers. For the AI/ML community this signals both market acceleration and realignment: large tech firms are reallocating resources toward AI productization, platform work and operational ML (MLOps) while reducing roles that can be automated or centralized. Expect heightened demand for engineers who can deploy and scale models, optimize inference costs on cloud infrastructure, build tooling around data pipelines and embed generative/automation capabilities into services. The cuts also underscore social and ethical tensions—automation-driven displacement, changing job profiles, and how cloud providers balance investment in new AI services with workforce shifts. The exact scope remains fluid, but the move confirms AI is driving strategic and staffing decisions at scale.