The restructuring at the corporate level comes less than a day after a Reuters report suggested Amazon was preparing to cut as many as 30,000 corporate roles. While the final number is lower, the 14,000-job reduction still marks one of the company's largest layoffs in years, underscoring its push to reduce pandemic hiring and streamline operations with chatbots and other next-generation technologies.

The incoming layoffs were outlined in a letter signed by Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of People Experience and Technology. She said:

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.

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 convinced 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.

At 14,000 corporate job cuts, that's roughly 4% of Amazon's corporate workforce of about 350,000 employees. Amazon's total workforce is 1.55 million, including warehouse and delivery workers, making the corporate-level restructuring peanuts compared to the overall workforce.