Amazon just announced its second round of corporate layoffs with more than 16,000 roles being eliminated due to AI. As automation becomes the very heart of entire industries, this move signals a frightening yet all-too-familiar trend we’ve already seen before.
When a company as large as Amazon makes job cuts this drastically and quickly, workers across sectors are left scrambling to figure out what to do. Salaries have officially come to a halt, lifelines have been negatively disrupted, and surrounding communities have to pivot their needs somewhere else.
To understand this kind of urgency, it helps to recognize where Amazon is right now. At first, the company expanded aggressively during the pandemic in hopes of growing its e-commerce demand when everything shifted to virtual overnight. As consumer behavior started to normalize a few years after 2020, Amazon found itself over capacity when AI stepped into operations. The result became less space for human teams overall, and a sharper focus on positions that directly support machine learning and efficiency at scale.
In part, Amazon’s decision is not simply about cost cutting alone. It reflects a deeper shift in how everyday work flows as a whole. AI is increasingly capable of handling routine tasks, and companies are redesigning their strategies around AI-first approaches. What used to involve humans to accomplish goals can now be managed by a singular agent alone.
Consequently, roles that do not evolve with this emerging reality are becoming the most vulnerable in today’s economy. For workers, that means there’s ongoing uncertainty about what kind of tasks get done, if any at all. For executive leadership, it means having to reskill where necessary and recruiting talent that aligns with such AI-driven tools.
This is where the conversation around AI training becomes incredibly crucial. As companies look to restructure their teams, they are not just eliminating roles, they are reshaping where humans might add value right alongside AI.
In practice, what that looks like is employing people who understand how to prompt, supervise, and deploy AI responsibly. It’s about training the right workers to have AI fluency so they can be prepared as organizations continue to automate.
Workforce training programs like CodeBoxx Academy have emerged in response to this growing skills gap. Led by Director Brian Peret, he argues that preparing individuals with applied AI capabilities is the exact toolkit people need when disruptions like Amazon’s occur. By having the AI education, these kinds of employees are more equipped to pivot quickly into new roles or adjacent fields where demand remains strong.
If the warning was not already clear, other stories have shown layoff culture is happening beyond just Amazon. Across the tech industry, job cuts continue to surge as companies shift their workforces amid this AI era. In 2025, global tech firms eliminated hundreds of thousands of roles, with estimates suggesting that roughly a quarter-million employees were dropped worldwide as organizations integrated AI into their workflow.
Without properly training employees in the age of AI now, the lasting effects could look alarmingly severe. Organizations risk chasing talent they cannot retain or fully utilize. Instead of building resilient infrastructure, businesses end up with fractured workforces where lack of knowledge slows innovation and morale erodes entirely. In the long run, this delayed approach costs far more consequences, and the stakes have never been higher.
Most of all, this moment marks a major turning point for the future of work altogether. It is inevitable that companies are becoming purely automated, therefore teams must make the important choice to either ride the opportunity or lag further behind. If organizations want to win, and if people want to stay employed, it starts by building resumes that translate AI output into real impact.
Amazon may have had a second layer of layoffs, and if the pattern persists, there’s likely going to be another one soon. Yet, as long as workers are trained to work with AI, rather than around it, navigating this uncertain labor market doesn’t have to be feared.
