Amazon is preparing to cut as much as 15% of its human resources staff, with additional layoffs likely in other divisions, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
Two sources told Fortune that Amazon’s human resources division—known internally as PXT or the People eXperience Technology team—will be hard hit, but that other areas of Amazon’s core consumer business are also likely to be affected. It couldn’t be learned how many employees in total Amazon plans to let go, nor the exact timing of the cuts.
The company laid off relatively small numbers of employees earlier this year in areas such as its consumer devices unit, its Wondery podcast division, and in Amazon Web Services.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel declined to comment.
Amazon’s PXT division, which reports to senior vice president Beth Galetti, has more than 10,000 employees worldwide, and includes a large recruiting team, plus technology staff and other traditional HR roles.
The new cuts come as Amazon continues to look for ways to lower employee costs while investing aggressively in AI products and infrastructure – both for internal use and to sell to enterprise customers. The company has said it intends to spend upwards of $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, as it builds out its cloud and AI datacenters.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy already oversaw the largest layoffs in company history from late 2022 into 2023, when the company cut at least 27,000 corporate jobs, which accounted for a high single digit percentage of the company’s office jobs. Many other Big Tech companies also slashed their headcounts around that time as the pandemic receded and consumer demand trends changed.
Now, many employers are looking to harness the power of AI—initially for mundane and repetitive tasks and eventually for more complicated jobs—to reduce the need to maintain the same level of human staffers on their payrolls.
Jassy himself is one of them. The CEO fired a bit of a warning shot to his own employees in June, when he encouraged them to welcome this new AI-powered era.
“Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company,” he wrote in a companywide email that was also published on Amazon’s corporate blog.
At the same time, Jassy also made a point to note that there won’t be room on the bus for everyone: “We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Jassy, who succeeded Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the CEO job in 2021, has earned a reputation as a cost-cutter (though to be fair, he inherited a company that many say had become wasteful and bloated in some areas). Amazon executives regularly require managers to hit a certain percentage goal for unregretted attrition, or URA – essentially a percentage of employees that the company would be OK losing, whether through voluntary departures, being “managed out,” or through formal layoffs. But sources told Fortune that these cuts are being discussed differently internally than the typical URA process.
While Amazon plans these layoffs of corporate roles, the company announced its typical holiday hiring spree of warehouse staff on Tuesday. This year, the company will hire 250,000 seasonal employees across its US warehouse and logistics networks.
Amazon’s stock price is down about a little more than 1% this calendar year, but 15% higher than it was 12 months earlier. The company will report earnings later this month.
Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp at 917-655-4267. You can also contact him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X, @jdelrey on Threads, and on Bluesky.
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