An ex-manager at Amazon who spent seven years at the company, five of them as an L7 senior manager handling large teams, said in a YouTube video posted last month on her channel, Becky Global, that “AI is just a cover story” for the company’s layoffs.
She noted, sure, AI is a part of it; it accelerates it, but more than anything, it is “a very convenient excuse.”
“Because it’s much better to say in front of the board that we’re investing heavily on AI and in the future versus admitting that, oops, we overhired and let politics hollow the org out,” she added.
Amazon has recently laid off about 16,000 workers, confirming earlier reports from anonymous sources who told Reuters about the cuts. In October 2025, the company also let go of around 14,000 white-collar staff, including more than 1,800 engineers.
While those layoffs were widely linked to overhiring, echoing Becky’s claim, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had warned as early as June that the growing use of AI tools and agents would likely lead to further corporate job cuts.
According to Becky, three of her former Amazon colleagues were among those laid off in January. One later texted her asking whether she had seen the layoffs coming when she quit the company last year.
Although she said she did not have a specific date in mind, she knew it was “on the wall.”
As someone who had witnessed it on the inside, she described the layoffs as Amazon “trying to stop the bleeding from what felt like a rotting system”.
Before Becky left, she had spent years overseeing Amazon’s annual planning process, known internally as OP1, for her organisation, but every year since the pandemic, she said “the voice from the top got harsher” as “the math wasn’t checking out”.
The company’s workforce nearly doubled in two years, from about 800,000 employees in 2019 to roughly 1.6 million in 2021.
Becky shared that, in 2020, everyone in the organisation was asking for more headcount even when it made no sense. For example, six product managers were working on finding UX issues on one checkout page.
“I think Amazon had turned from an innovation engine to what it felt like a turf-grabbing war machine. More headcount meant more power and more power meant more importance,” she said.
However, revenue and profit do not care about organisation charts.
As the company headcount expanded, its revenue per employee dropped sharply — from around US$484,000 (S$617,954) in 2020 to about US$362,000 in 2021, before falling further to roughly just US$320,000 in 2022.
“In fact, looking at internal data at the time, it was even worse depending on the business units, ” she added.
Becky described how headcount asks became nearly impossible to secure, but then hiring freezes followed, and after that came “return to office gimmicks and policies to quietly push people out without paying the packages.”
“So if you were paying attention, you would have noticed it coming,” she said.
“Hence, when the layoffs actually happened, I wasn’t shocked. This was written on the wall long before ChatGPT.”
In her seven years with Amazon, Becky said she finally quit because she felt workers’ calendars may have been buried in documents, meetings and arguments but not in innovation.
She claimed, “Across all of those seven years, I can honestly say…the only project that was ever launched on time was built by a Japan team, and guess what, that was the first team that was let go in this whole layoff game. So at Amazon, it truly felt like technical skills aren’t what (get) you rewarded.”
She also said, “I felt I wasn’t worth the money that the company was paying me for, and the company wasn’t worth the life I was giving it.”
“In my humble opinion, big tech might look invincible today, but systems rot quietly before they collapse. Even empires do,” she added. /TISG
