Amazon looking to cut 600,000 roles through automation, report

Leaked documents suggest that warehouse jobs may be a thing of the past

Amazon aims to automate 75% of its operations by 2033, potentially avoiding the hiring of over 600,000 US workers by that time, with 160,000 roles eliminated by 2027.

That’s according to internal documents seen by the New York Times detailing discussions within the ecommerce giant’s robotics division.

It follows a report by Business Insider in May, in which internal documents seen by the publication described robots as "critical to flattening Amazon's hiring curve over the next ten years," as well as a steady stream of job losses over the past three years including in HR, Advertising, AWS, Books and Devices, and layers of management.

At 1.55 million people, Amazon’s global workforce is now 27,000 less than it was in 2022.

This week it was reported that 40% of AWS’s DevOps team was chopped– just before the outage that affected numerous websites worldwide.

Meanwhile Fortune reports that Amazon is preparing to cut more jobs this year in its People Experience and Technology (PXT) division, which oversees HR and recruitment.

According to the NYT, Amazon calculates that automation will save about 30 cents per item delivered by further automating its warehouses, leading to $12.6 billion in reduced expenditure from 2025 to 2027.

Amazon has sought to downplay the reports, characterising the documents as exchanges of ideas rather than statements of strategy. A spokesperson told the NYT that the company has historically invested savings from automation in activities that create new roles.

Nevertheless, where Amazon leads other retailers tend to follow and big changes to the way goods are distributed and delivered could send shockwaves through a job market already on edge about the impact of AI.