Sam Altman has already put on the table that AI is one of the best excuses in big tech to justify the rounds of layoffs that will happen in 2026.
But during an interview Dr Fox NewsJeff Bezos has assured that he does not believe AI is primarily responsible for the layoffs, though he attributes them to a future in which AI has a priority role for Amazon, and has urged growth to justify the layoffs in the context of an Amazon.
Order from the sofa. Amazon’s founder justified Amazon’s excessive growth during the pandemic due to the massive increase in demand for online commerce due to mobility restrictions. “People were ordering from home, and that’s why we really increased our workforce,” Bezos said. He recalled that it was “an incredibly stressful time for us.”
According to Bezos, Amazon has since emerged overstaffed, and the numbers prove him right. According to the documentation the company has to file with the Securities Market Commission (SEC). At the end of 2019, the company had 798,000 employees. Two years later there were already 1.6 million employees. More than doubled in just 24 months.
30,000 layoffs in three months. When demand for online products is low, layoffs begin. In October 2025, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs, and in January 2026, another 16,000 layoffs were confirmed, adding 30,000 positions in three months. Director Beth Galletti spoke of “strengthening the organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and eliminating bureaucracy.”
However, there is some contradiction in Bezos’ words, since the layoffs did not occur among employees responsible for fulfilling online shopping needs, something that would be reasonable if demand for orders decreased. According to Amazon documents presented to the SEC, its workforce continued to be 1,576 million people at the end of 2025 and increased to 1,595 million in the first quarter of 2026. ReutersAmong those 30,000 layoff announcements, Amazon let go of less than 1,000 office workers from the retail business.
Reveals a face of AI. In June 2025, Andy Jassy warned his employees that AI would change work. “We will need fewer people to do some of the work we do today,” he wrote in a memo. A few months later, Amazon’s current CEO assured investors that layoffs would reduce the company’s hierarchical levels to make it more agile for the future.
Actually, as a highlight ReutersA good portion of the 30,000 employees who were laid off worked in divisions such as Alexa, Devices, Prime Video, Advertising or Devices. Not in warehouses, fulfillment centers or delivery workers, as one would expect, as Bezos said it “returns to normal” after the 2020 demand peak. said Karan Girotra, a professor at Cornell Euronews That “maybe everything was oversized from the beginning.” And he concluded that “you reduce the workforce, you attribute it to AI, and you already have a valuable story.”
Money changes place. If the total number of Amazon employees has barely changed since 2021, and more than 30,000 people have lost their jobs during that time, where have the changes occurred? The answer that clears X is clear: in AI. Amazon didn’t lay off workers to replace them, but moved those positions away from unprofitable divisions to give more resources to their AI developer AWS divisions.
According to its official data, its turnover in the second quarter was 200.6 billion, which is 20% higher than the previous period, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) grew by 37% during that period. The company raised its 2026 capital spending to around $220 billion, specifically for AI. And all this with almost the same 2021 workforce which, according to Bezos, was large. In reality, Amazon’s layoffs due to declining online sales did not indicate an economic crisis, it was a matter of shifting eggs into another basket.
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Picture | Flickr (iafastro), Magnificent
