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Hundreds of British jobs are under threat after Amazon revealed plans to axe 14,000 roles worldwide in a major shake-up that will see it pouring billions into artificial intelligence (AI). The US tech giant announced that the roles within its corporate workforce, which do not include warehouse workers or delivery drivers, would be eliminated in a bid to cut costs. While the company did not specify exactly where the axe would fall, a source close to Amazon UK said ‘of course’ some losses would come from the British operation due to its size. Amazon employs around 75,000 staff in the UK, although it does not disclose how many of these are office-based. The company’s entire global corporate workforce is estimated to be 350,000, meaning the cuts will affect about 4 per cent of office roles. Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said the company wanted to ‘operate like the world’s largest start-up’ and said the planned cuts were part of an effort aimed at ‘reducing bureaucracy, removing layers and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets’. One of these bets is the use of AI, which Galetti described as ‘the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet’. Despite the cuts, Galetti said Amazon would continue to hire in what she called ‘key strategic areas’ of the business. The firm is planning to spend £89billion this year, most of which will be used to build vast data centres to power AI machines as Amazon races to compete with rivals Microsoft and Google.
