The cuts continue at Amazon. The e-commerce giant, which during the pandemic has been on a hiring spree, has laid off more than 27,000 people in the last two years. Part of the layoffs directly affected Amazon Devices, the division that encompasses, among other things, the Echo and Alexa products. The company has just announced a new round of layoffs, this time numbering in the “hundreds”.
According to Reuters, the news broke this morning on Washington time when employees received an internal email. “We are making changes in our efforts to better align with our business priorities and we know what matters most to customers, which includes maximising our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” said Alexa and Fire TV chief Daniel Rausch.
Alexa at the epicentre of this round of layoffs
Unlike previous layoffs, which spanned several divisions, Amazon has focused on Alexa, a voice assistant that has squandered billions of dollars and was once innovative (like Siri or Google Assistant), but whose evolution has stalled, leading users to use it for basic tasks like playing music, setting alarms, checking the weather or controlling connected home devices.
The world, at least for the moment, seems obsessed with the evolution of artificial intelligence and applications such as ChatGPT. Against this backdrop we have seen Amazon invest $4 billion in Antrophic, an OpenAI rival, and promise the arrival of generative AI to Alexa to improve the capabilities of its assistant. It is after this that the company has opted to cut “hundreds of roles” in Alexa.
The layoffs will affect company employees in different parts of the world. Employees in the US and Canada hit by the cuts will be notified today, while those in India will find out on Monday morning local time. The manner of the announcement, as we can see, will leave many people uncertain this weekend whether they will keep their jobs on Monday or not.
In the midst of this year’s employee exodus, Dave Limp, the head of Amazon Devices, said in February that Amazon remained “fully committed” to Alexa. We’ll have to wait and see how things evolve within the company and whether the voice assistant will indeed recover the splendour it had in its early days. For the time being, as we say, this is a challenge that other Big Tech assistants are also facing.