Amazon senior VP Amit Agarwal on layoffs: Job cuts are primarily about …

Amazon announced around 14,000 job cuts in October this year. Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti informed the staff that the job cuts are part of the organisational changes happening across Amazon. Now, Amazon senior vice president for emerging markets Amit Agarwal has said that recent round of layoffs conducted at Amazon are aimed at removing organisational layers at the company. Speaking to Economic Times in an interview, Agarwal emphasised that the removal of organisational layers will enable Amazon to operate with agility of a startup in an AI-driven world.

As mentioned above, Amazon fired around 14,000 employees in October and nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce. In India, between 800 and 1,000 positions across finance, marketing, HR, and technology were impacted, according to ET.

Amazon senior VP Amit Agarwal underlines the primary reason for layoffs

Agarwal further explained that the restructuring happening at Amazon is part of CEO Andy Jassy’s vision to make Amazon the ‘biggest startup’. “To operate that way, we need fewer layers. The workforce reductions are primarily about removing those layers, and we’ll continue to do that because we want to stay lean and move like a startup. At the same time, we’ll keep hiring where we need to,” he told ET.

Along with this, Amazon is also urging its employees to use artificial intelligence in order to boost productivity, underscoring how technology and efficiency are central to its future strategy.

What Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said about the layoffs

Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared his point of view on the recent Amazon layoffs. Jassy clarified that the job cuts are not impacted by AI or aimed to cut costs. Instead, the reason behind Amazon’s 14,000 job cuts is ‘culture’. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said while speaking at the company’s quarterly earnings call. “It really — it's culture,” he added.

“And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” Jassy explained during the earnings call.

“And when that happens, Sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work,” he continued.

Amazon’s quick commerce strategy in India

On Amazon’s expansion in India’s competitive quick commerce market, Agarwal said growth would be anchored to Prime membership clusters rather than a fixed city rollout. “Our expansion isn’t tied to a fixed city count. It’s centred on Prime-dense clusters. We want to cover the largest percentage of Prime members with that service,” he noted.