From surplus to strategic: How learning can help companies ride the next wave of job redesign

Amazon has announced plans to cut around 14,000 corporate roles across its global workforce as it restructures for what chief executive Andy Jassy described as ‘the next phase of our business’.

The announcement follows similar restructuring across the technology sector as companies adapt to automation and post-pandemic realignment.

• Around 14,000 jobs will go, 4 per cent of Amazon’s 350,000-strong corporate workforce
• The cuts are concentrated in corporate and tech roles rather than fulfilment or logistics
• The company says the changes are designed to flatten management layers and redeploy resources into growth areas such as AI, cloud computing and advertising
• Employees affected in many countries will have 90 days to look for new internal roles before redundancy applies
• Amazon will continue hiring into strategic areas in 2026 but expects a leaner overall structure
• Amazon’s statement said the move would ‘simplify decision-making and accelerate innovation’, part of a broader shift as generative AI transforms how the company operates.

Analysts say the cuts mirror a wider slowdown across the sector. ‘Big tech companies have trimmed their workforces as they rearrange their strategies and pull back from the more aggressive hiring that they did during the early post-pandemic years,’ said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, speaking to Associated Press.

A new phase for workforce learning

For learning and development teams, across industry, the announcement underlines a wider inflection point. The conversation is no longer about scaling learning to support growth but about how learning supports strategic workforce redesign.

AI, automation and organisational flattening are changing the jobs that companies need. Roles in areas such as administrative support, data processing and routine software development are being displaced, while demand for expertise in data science, AI engineering, product innovation and customer experience is growing sharply.

This shift challenges L&D to move beyond delivering content and towards enabling agility: helping employees transition between roles, build digital confidence and prepare for work that blends human judgement with the tech.

Learning platforms and vendors offering AI-related skills, data literacy and adaptive learning programmes are likely to see growing demand from companies managing similar transitions.

Amazon’s move will, or should, ripple across corporate learning. It demonstrates how major employers are not immune to structural redesign driven by AI. For the learning profession, it reinforces a key message to act now to embed re-skilling, career mobility and human-AI collaboration into learning strategy.