Amazon Tells Thousands Of Staff To Relocate As CEO Touts AI's Power To Replace Jobs

Amazon is escalating its battle to bring employees together. 

The tech giant is asking several thousand employees to relocate to specific locations to be closer to their teams, in some cases asking staffers to move across the country. 

The rolling efforts are the latest move from CEO Andy Jassy to refocus the Amazon workforce, and this one comes just days after he wrote a memo to staff saying that artificial intelligence would shrink headcount at the firm. 

The policy change will impact thousands of employees across several teams. The company had approximately 1.5 million employees at the end of 2024.  

Amazon is rolling out the mandate in individual meetings and town halls rather than putting the requests in an email, sources at the company told Bloomberg, which first reported the news.

The relocation decisions are being made on a team-by-team basis, according to an Amazon spokesperson. Some workers are being directed to Amazon’s major hubs in Seattle, Virginia and Washington, D.C., but the spokesperson said the goal of the relocations was to colocate teams around the country. 

Amazon began requiring its employees to come into the office five days a week at the start of the year, but the policy allowed staff to show up at any of Amazon’s many offices around the country, including in hubs like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas and Austin. 

Many of those employees were hired for what they were told were fully remote positions during the pandemic, per Bloomberg. The latest announcements led employees to take to internal message boards to vent their complaints, according to the outlet. 

It’s not immediately clear what, if any, impact the shuffling of staff will have on Amazon's footprint. The $2.3T company is still leasing new office space and recently announced it was adding another 26K SF to a 50K SF office lease it had signed earlier in the year in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighborhood. 

Workers are being given varying timelines, in some cases 12 months, to make their moves, depending on their role and the needs of their business line. Employees are being offered relocation support, according to the spokesperson. 

One employee was told by their manager that they had 30 days to decide whether they would relocate and 60 days after that to arrive at their new office, according to internal messages reviewed by Bloomberg. They were told no severance pay was being offered if they declined to move.   

Earlier this week, Jassy sent a note to employees explaining that he expected AI would allow the company to automate routine and repetitive tasks, and in turn, reduce its total corporate workforce. New jobs requiring deeper expertise would also be created, he said.  

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said, according to Reuters.

The Amazon spokesperson pointed to a September 2023 Jassy memo to staff highlighting the importance of sharing the same office space as evidence that the relocations being rolled out now do not represent a shift in policy. 

“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” he wrote at the time.

Amazon and other tech giants embarked on substantial layoffs as the global economy emerged from the pandemic. Amazon cut 27,000 jobs in its biggest-ever round of layoffs in 2022, a move that stretched into the following year. 

A wave of forced relocations could lead some workers to quit. Tech firms were among the hardest to push their workers to return to the office, often being met with disinterest or hostility.