Amazon cuts ‘several hundred’ jobs

Amazon is cutting “several hundred” jobs from its Alexa division to focus more on artificial intelligence, the company announced Friday.

Daniel Rausch, the vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, said in a note to employees Friday morning that Amazon was “encouraged by the progress we’re making” but had decided to shift focus.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” Rausch wrote in the note. “These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated.” 

In the memo, which Amazon shared with The Seattle Times, Rausch said all impacted employees in the United States and Canada would be notified via email Friday morning. Amazon will reach out to India-based employees affected by the cuts next week, and other regions later. 

A company spokesperson declined to share how this round of job cuts would affect Amazon’s Puget Sound workforce. Amazon did not specify which initiatives in its Alexa division it had decided to discontinue. 

Ken Obata, a data engineer based in Toronto who was laid off Friday, said he had already felt a shift toward AI in the company but didn’t expect the job cuts. 

He pointed to two themes in Amazon’s AI push: generative AI, the buzzy artificial intelligence that is able to create its own content, like text or images; and large language models, or LLMs, a type of algorithm that is trained on data sets to recognize, summarize and predict content. 

Obata said his role didn’t fit into those categories. He was focused on the “fundamental lifestyle of customers,” like Amazon’s smart-home features. His team often worked on how to execute those features, like enabling Alexa to turn lights on and off in different parts of a customer’s home. 

“I know there is an LLM trend” in Amazon, tech companies and the stock market, Obata said. But “Alexa still has lots of features for customers” and his team was still an “important component” of the company’s success, he continued.

“LLM is not everything,” he said.

As he starts looking for a new job, Obata said he expects he’ll have to market his AI skills. He worked at Amazon for about a year and a half and doesn’t intend to look for new openings at the company after so many job cuts. “The same thing can happen,” he said. “I think this is enough.” 

Around this time last year, Amazon began making cuts to its Devices division, the business unit responsible for the Alexa voice assistant, as well as Kindle, smart-home products, Echo speakers and its home robot, Astro. 

Dave Limp, then senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, said at the time, “after a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs.” 

Limp has since left the company and joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin. 

Devices was one of the first business units to face job cuts last year that would eventually touch most parts of the company and result in roughly 27,000 layoffs between November 2022 and March. 

This month, news of more Amazon job cuts broke. The company said Monday it would cut 180 jobs from its gaming division and shut down two business units, including a channel on the company’s own livestreaming site Twitch. Earlier in November, Amazon reportedly made cuts to its music streaming team.

The cuts to Amazon’s Alexa team come nearly 10 years after the company launched its voice assistant in 2014. Since then, Amazon has faced speculation about the profitability of the device, as well as allegations from government regulators that Alexa may be gathering more information about consumers than users agreed to. Amazon denied those claims and agreed to pay $25 million to settle the complaint from the Federal Trade Commission.

In September, at an annual event to unveil new Amazon technology, the company said it planned to make Alexa chattier and more conversational by harnessing the power of generative AI. The newly designed Alexa would have its own preferences and personality, and be able to continue a conversation after users walk away from the device and return. 

Generative AI is “going to drive an entirely new Alexa experience,” Limp said at the event.

Generative AI has become Amazon’s buzzword even outside of its Devices unit. Sellers on Amazon’s digital store can use the technology to write product descriptions and shoppers can use it to more quickly skim product reviews. 

Amazon Web Services’ customers can use Amazon Bedrock to build apps on top of generative AI models. And developers can tap into Amazon’s AI-powered coding assistant, Code Whisperer, to generate their own lines of code.

“The AWS team continues to innovate and deliver at a rapid clip, particularly in generative AI,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a news release announcing Amazon’s most recent financial results. 

The company recorded almost $10 billion in profits between the beginning of July and end of September, which executives credited to increased interest in generative AI, stabilizing growth at AWS and faster delivery speeds for e-commerce customers. 

Rausch, the VP of Alexa and Fire TV, said Friday that Amazon remains “optimistic about the future of Alexa.” 

“Alexa remains an incredibly important part of our business,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the innovation we’ve driven, and continue to drive.”

Employees affected by the layoffs will receive a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, external job placement support and paid time to look for a new role, Amazon said.

It’s not clear how the last year of job cuts have affected Amazon’s HQ1 headquarters in Seattle and Bellevue. In January, Amazon filed a notice with Washington’s Employment Security Department detailing it had cut 1,852 positions in Seattle and 448 in Bellevue. Amazon hasn’t filed similar notices since then.