Big Technology Companies Are Cutting Thousands of Jobs This Week

This week, one of the biggest technology companies in the world made an important announcement. Amazon said it would fire about 14,000 workers who work in office jobs. These workers do things like manage teams, plan projects, and make reports. The company said it is making this change because of artificial intelligence—technology that can learn and make decisions by itself.

Amazon explained that AI can now do many of the jobs that middle managers do every day. These jobs include writing summaries of meetings, creating reports, helping teams work together, and making decisions about what the company should do next. By using AI instead of people for these jobs, Amazon thinks it can move faster and make better decisions. The company is not cutting factory workers or people who work in warehouses yet, but office workers.

Other Major Companies Are Also Cutting Jobs

Amazon is not alone. This week, many other big companies announced they would also cut jobs. Target, which is a large store in the United States, announced it would cut about 1,000 jobs and not fill 800 other jobs that were open. Meta, which owns Facebook, cut 600 jobs from its artificial intelligence team. Google cut over 100 jobs in its cloud division. These are all important companies that millions of people use every day.

Other big companies that cut jobs recently include Intel, which cut about 24,000 jobs (which is 22% of all its workers), and Microsoft, which cut about 9,000 jobs. Salesforce, a software company, cut 4,000 customer service jobs because the company said AI could now do half of the work that these employees did. These numbers show that job cuts because of AI are happening across many different types of companies, not just one or two.

The Total Number of Job Cuts in 2025 Is Very High

When you add up all the companies cutting jobs, the number is very large. A report released in early October said that employers in the United States announced 946,000 job cuts so far in 2025—the highest number since 2020. Of these job cuts, over 17,000 were directly caused by artificial intelligence, and another 20,000 were because of other kinds of automation and technology updates. Even more job cuts were announced after this report came out this week.

Technology companies have been hit especially hard. According to a website that tracks all job cuts, about 218 technology companies cut jobs in 2025, and more than 112,000 technology workers lost their jobs. This means technology workers are being hurt more than workers in other industries. The report also said that tech companies alone have cut 108,000 jobs so far this year.

Young Workers and Entry-Level Workers Are Hurt the Most

One of the most important things about these job cuts is who they hurt the most. The workers being cut are not only experienced, older workers—young people looking for their first jobs are also being hurt. The Federal Reserve warned that hiring has slowed down especially for early-career employees. This means it is much harder for young people to find jobs right now.

CEO Andy Jassy at Amazon said that the company will need "fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." This means that some jobs will disappear, but Amazon hopes to create new jobs. However, young workers might not have the skills for these new jobs yet.

One expert said this could be really bad for young people. "Its short-term effects are clear: It is decimating white-collar information work, and reducing entry-level opportunities for young people," said one business analyst. This means that the jobs that young people usually start with—office jobs, customer service jobs, and other jobs that involve information and computers—are disappearing the fastest because AI can do these jobs.

What Kind of Work Is AI Replacing?

It is interesting that AI is replacing office jobs first, not factory jobs. For many years, people thought robots and AI would replace factory workers first. But that has not happened yet. Instead, AI is replacing white-collar jobs—jobs where people sit in offices and do computer work. These are jobs like data entry, writing reports, customer service, and managing other workers.

AI is really good at these kinds of jobs because they involve information and thinking, not physical work. For example, AI can read through lots of information and write a summary, which is exactly what a middle manager does. AI can also answer customer questions by looking at information on the computer. This is why companies like Salesforce were able to cut so many customer service jobs.

What Do Experts Think Will Happen Next?

Experts have different ideas about what will happen next. One group of experts called Gartner estimated that by 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to eliminate half of their management layers. This means that middle management jobs could be cut in half in many companies. If this happens, the job market could change a lot.

However, other experts are not sure if AI is really the only reason for these job cuts. Some say that companies also cut jobs because business was bad during and after the pandemic, and now they are trying to fix that. Others say that even though AI might cut some jobs, it might also create new jobs that we do not know about yet.

One researcher at MIT said, "AI is an extremely useful, transformative technology, but I think we still need to work on it more to realize its full effects." She also said that "the role AI is playing in job losses is perhaps being overstated." This means we should be careful about thinking AI is replacing all jobs immediately.

What Is Being Done to Help?

Some places are trying to make rules about how companies can use AI when making decisions about jobs. In the state of California in the United States, new rules started on October 1 that require companies to be careful about using AI to hire and fire workers. These rules say that people (not just AI) must be involved in job decisions and that the AI tools must be fair and not treat some people worse than others.

These rules are important because they try to make sure that AI helps workers, not just companies save money. However, it is not clear if these rules will stop companies from cutting jobs or changing them.