‘We’re grateful for the contributions of every impacted employee,’ an Amazon spokesperson says.
Amazon has confirmed to CRN that it is “eliminating some roles” within its division for artificial general intelligence—a theoretical AI that understands, learns and applies knowledge just like a human—days ahead of when the company reports earnings for its second fiscal quarter.
“We’ve been building large AI models for several years, and it remains one of the most important things we’re working on,” a spokesperson for the Seattle-based technology giant said in an email to CRN on Wednesday. “This is a fast-moving space, and we’re sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts. That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers’ future.”
Amazon did not disclose how many employees were affected.
The spokesperson added that Amazon is “committed to supporting impacted employees through their transition,” with U.S. employees receiving “pay and benefits for 90 days, outplacement job search support, access to transitional health benefits, and be eligible for a severance payment. We’re grateful for the contributions of every impacted employee.”
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Amazon Confirms Artificial General Intelligence Workforce Cuts
Ted Stuart, president and chief operating officer of Amazon Web Services-focused cloud services provider Mission Cloud, which is part of CDW, recently told CRN in an interview that his company is investing in AI-focused products including AIM, or AI with Mission, a spin on the AI Roadmap Prioritization (AIR) Workshop from AWS, and Five-by-Five-by-Five, based on Amazon Quick.
“We also offer a fixed-fee chatbot and an agentic POC (proof of concept),” Stuart said. “Then, depending on what’s important to the customer and what their use cases are, we’ll go from there.”
Multiple AWS partners have looked at ways to combine that practice with one dedicated to an AI upstart such as Anthropic. BizCloud Experts President Sepehr Noorizadeh told CRN in a recent interview that, for example, BizCloud leveraged both companies’ technology to improve how a client handled customer quotes and invoice scheduling.
“What we’ve done is look at how can we collaborate with the AWS team and the Anthropic team to actually find the purpose-fit model for them (customers), and provide that feedback loop back to Anthropic and to the AWS team on what we’re seeing in the front line for customers,” BizCloud Experts President Sepehr Noorizadeh told CRN in a recent interview.
Although Amazon has continued to invest in AI and new AI capabilities across its product stack that can appeal to businesses in the short term, AGI remains a more far-flung version of the technology. Industry timelines for AGI range from 2027 to 2040 and beyond.
AGI-related executives who have left the company in recent months include David Luan, the former vice president and head of Amazon’s AGI Lab and agentic AI research and development (R&D).
Amazon reports its next quarterly earnings on July 30, covering the three months ended June 30. The vendor has been cutting tens of thousands of employees as it prioritizes AI investments and following massive hiring increases industrywide during the global pandemic.
Other layoffs conducted and announced so far this year include Intel’s Data Center Group, Cisco cutting thousands of jobs, NetApp permanently letting go of 77 employees from around its San Jose, Calif., headquarters, and Cognizant’s plans to spend upward of $270 million on employee severance and other personnel-related costs as part of layoffs under its “Project Leap” initiative to become more agile and enable an artificial intelligence-enabled operating model.
