E-commerce company Amazon is eliminating hundreds of jobs at its headquarters in Seattle. A shift toward using more robots and computers for functions once performed by humans could be witnessed.
Michael Lagoni, a chief executive officer of Stacking stated, “Amazon is preferring automation for a wide number of topics such as forecasting demand for new products and negotiating their prices.”
The company said in an emailed statement, “As part of our annual planning process, we are making headcount adjustments across the company – small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others.” The email further added, “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”
According to the sources, Amazon has 3,900 corporate jobs open in Seattle, part of 12,000 such positions open worldwide. It has been diversifying in e-commerce categories such as groceries, fashion and furniture while also providing its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services.
Last year, Amazon declared that it planned to create 100,000 jobs in the US. In fact, the company is also in the process of choosing a city for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, where it strategized to create 50,000 jobs.