Amazon announced on Tuesday that it plans to cut nearly 14,000 corporate jobs, just months after CEO Andy Jassy had warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could reduce the company’s workforce.

In a surprising twist during Amazon’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, Andy Jassy clarified that the layoffs were not about cost-cutting or the adoption of AI. Instead, he said the affected employees did not align with Amazon’s culture. This marked the first time he addressed the layoffs since their announcement.

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Andy Jassy said, adding that “it really — it’s culture.”

Jobs cuts driven by culture?

Andy Jassy’s remarks align with Amazon’s broader mission to reshape its culture this year, as chronicled by Business Insider. He has been working to raise the e-commerce giant’s performance standards, enforce discipline, and eliminate bureaucracy across the company.

During the earnings call, Jassy explained that Amazon’s rapid growth in recent years had led to the creation of “a lot more layers,” which has ultimately slowed down the decision-making process. He stressed the need for the company to “operate leaner and move faster,” especially amid the transformative impact of AI across different industries.

“Sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work,” Jassy added. “And it can lead to slowing you down.”

Conflicting rationale: Culture vs AI transformation

While Jassy focused on cultural and structural factors behind the layoffs, the initial announcement — made by Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, through a blog post on Tuesday — cited a different reason.

Galetti explained that the rapid evolution of the world due to AI was the reason behind reducing employee headcount, despite the company’s strong performance.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones),” Galetti wrote in the blog post.

The most recent layoffs at Amazon marked the company’s biggest job cut since it let go of 27,000 employees in late 2022, Business Insider reported.

The move also points to a wider trend in Big Tech. Companies like Google and Microsoft are embracing what’s being called the “Great Flattening” – trimming layers of managers to move faster and reduce corporate bloat.

Amazon also disclosed that last quarter’s layoffs came with an estimated $1.8 billion in severance costs, the news report said.