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Amazon’s recent round of layoffs has sparked fresh debate across India’s tech and corporate circles. In October, the company announced that around 14,000 positions globally would be eliminated, impacting nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce. In India alone, an estimated 800 to 1,000 roles across finance, HR, marketing and technology were affected.

Yet Amazon insists the story isn’t one of shrinking budgets or AI-driven displacement. Instead, senior leadership says the company is reshaping itself to work with the speed and agility of a startup, something they believe requires a flatter organisational structure.

Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s Senior Vice President for Emerging Markets, explained the company’s thinking in an interview with the Economic Times. The layoffs, he said, are part of a deliberate attempt to simplify internal processes by cutting down on layers of management.

“To operate that way, we need fewer layers. The workforce reductions are primarily about removing those layers, and we’ll continue to do that because we want to stay lean and move like a startup. At the same time, we’ll keep hiring where we need to,” Agarwal said.

Why Amazon Says AI Isn’t the Reason

In the global conversation around job cuts, automation and artificial intelligence are now the usual suspects. But Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took a different line during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

He stressed that the layoffs are not a direct result of AI replacing workers, nor are they part of a financial austerity plan.

"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. It really, it’s culture," Jassy said, signalling that Amazon’s leadership wants teams that can operate with more focus and less bureaucracy.

What emerges from both Jassy’s and Agarwal’s comments is Amazon’s belief that speed, rather than size, will define its next decade. And to maintain that speed, the company argues it has to shed layers, even if that means difficult workforce decisions in the short term.

India at the Centre of Amazon’s Next Decade

Even as Amazon trims management roles, India remains one of the company’s most important growth markets. Amazon has already invested nearly $40 billion in the country over the past 15 years, building out fulfilment centres, a vast logistics backbone, and one of the most widely used cloud infrastructures in the region.

Now, the company is going a step further. Amazon has committed an additional $35 billion through 2030 to strengthen its presence in India, with three priorities in focus: accelerating AI-led digitisation, bolstering India’s export ecosystem, and generating employment at scale.

As part of this push, Amazon says it aims to enable the creation of one million (10 lakh) new job opportunities in India by the end of the decade. This commitment includes jobs created directly within Amazon’s own operations as well as those generated across its supply chain, logistics partners, and seller ecosystem.

“We are humbled to have been a part of India’s digital transformation journey over the past 15 years, with Amazon’s growth in India perfectly aligned with the vision of an Atmanirbhar and Viksit Bharat,” Agarwal said. “We have invested at scale in growing the physical and digital infrastructure for small businesses in India, creating millions of jobs, and taking Made-in-India global.”