Tech
Amazon links planned mass layoff to AI | Computer Weekly
Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 employees amid an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cost-cutting drive.
On 28 October 2025, Amazon’s senior vice-president of people, experience and technology Beth Galetti confirmed to employees that the e-commerce behemoth plans to axe 14,000 roles from its corporate workforce, something she specified has been prompted and enabled by the firm’s AI investments.
“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs,” she said in a message sent to employees.
While Galetti signalled further cuts down the line as the company searches for further ways to “realise efficiency gains”, she also said that Amazon expects “to continue hiring in key strategic areas” through 2026.
Although she did not give any indication of what roles are being cut, from which business units or where they will be located globally, she said most employees being let go will be offered a 90-day window to look for new roles internally.
Galetti explicitly cited AI as a key factor contributing to the layoffs. “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well … What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” she said.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Galetti also referenced and linked to two previous employee messages from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. In the first, from September 2024, Jassy outlined the company’s ambitions “to operate like the world’s largest startup”, while in the second, from June 2025, he evangelised the “once-in-a-lifetime” potential of generative AI (GenAI) technologies to achieve this.
Highlighting how “AI will be a substantial catalyst” reshaping Amazon’s future workforce composition, Jassy said in June 2025 that over the next few years, “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company”.
He concluded by encouraging employees to “be curious” and “educate yourself” about the technology’s potential: “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”
Amazon’s last major round of job cuts came in early 2023. While the company sought to initially cut 18,000 jobs from its workforce in January that year, citing over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic, a further 9,000 cuts were announced that March, bringing the total to 27,000. A further round of job losses, which affected several hundred tech and sales staff at Amazon Web Services (AWS) specifically, came in April 2024.
From January to August 2024 thousands of tech sector jobs were axed, with many tech firms explicitly linking the layoffs taking place to the proliferation of AI and machine learning throughout their businesses.
This included Cisco, which cut 7% of its workforce while investing $1bn in AI-related startups; Dell, which cut sales roles to reallocate resources to its AI teams; Meta, which, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, laid employees off “so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around AI”; and Intuit, which cut 1,800 staff to free up more resources for integrating AI into its software offerings.
In November 2023, the Autonomy Institute think tank argued that although automating jobs with large language models (LLMs) could lead to significant reductions in working time without a loss of pay or productivity, realising the benefits of AI-driven productivity gains in this way will require concerted political action.
In a paper published 20 November 2023, Autonomy forecast that AI-led productivity gains could enable 8.8 million UK workers to have a four-day work week by 2033, while just under 28 million could have their working hours reduced by 10% in the same time, if LLMs are deployed in the right way.
“Our research offers a fresh perspective in debates around how AI can be utilised for good,” said Autonomy’s director of research, Will Stronge, at the time. “A shorter working week is the most tangible way of ensuring that AI delivers benefits to workers as well as companies. If AI is to be implemented fairly across the economy, it should usher in a new era of four-day working weeks for all.”
Autonomy noted that although people have long been predicting and expecting far shorter working weeks due to technological advances, historical increases in productivity over recent decades have not translated into increased wealth or leisure time for most people, largely as a result of economic inequality.
It said there is often a sense of pessimism around AI-driven productivity gains, with most conversations emphasising the potential for job losses and degraded working conditions, but that such gains could also be used to deliver shorter working weeks for many while also maintaining their pay and performance.
However, Autonomy was clear that productivity gains are not always shared evenly between employers and employees, and depend on “geographic, demographics, economic cycle and other intrinsic job market factors” such as workers’ access to collective bargaining.
“This is a paper that identifies an opportunity and not a destiny. The actual diffusion and adoption of technology is always uneven, driven by a variety of factors: wage levels, government policy, levels of sector monopolisation, trade union density and so on,” it said.
Tech
OnlyFans Goes to Business School
OnlyFans has tapped the founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform.
Rachael McCrary, a longtime lingerie designer and founder of the company Spice Rack, is launching four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They’ll focus on pitching investors, building a brand, and navigating being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary tells WIRED. More videos will follow. She’s also creating a Spice Rack x OnlyFans clothing line that will launch on the site later this year.
The move is OnlyFans’ first foray into making content focused solely on building a business. It’s part of the platform’s continued push into safe-for-work content that’s meant to complement the adult content it’s known for.
“OnlyFans is a community of over 4 million creator businesses, so it makes sense that we are the perfect platform to share tips on entrepreneurship,” Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans, tells WIRED in a statement. “As we’ve seen in other genres like comedy and sport, it takes just one creator to recognize the opportunity and others will follow suit.”
McCrary, 48, said she met Blair at the tech conference Summit Baja last November, when they came up with the idea.
As a former SuicideGirl—a community of alt pin-up girls founded in the early 2000s—she says she felt stigmatized by her past when working in corporate fashion. At one of her jobs, she says her colleagues looked at her SuicideGirls photos while she was at work.
“I just wanted to start crying,” she says.
Then she decided to launch her own businesses, but “pitching underwear to tech VCs, I already felt like I had to prove myself more,” McCrary says. According to Inc., only 1 percent of VC-funded companies were wholly led by women in 2024. Spice Rack, which McCrary says is backed by Sequoia Partners China and Mucker Capital, is among them.
“Being naked on the internet and raising venture capital from the largest funds in the world is a very rare Venn diagram,” McCrary says, adding that OnlyFans was already looking to expand into more non-adult content. “We decided to do a masterclass format of business classes.” The first two classes will be free, while the others will require a subscription to McCrary’s page.
Over the years, McCrary says, she’s been approached by many young women, including sex workers, seeking advice on how to start their own businesses or pivot away from adult content. After she revealed her past as a SuicideGirl on a panel in 2022, she says an adult content creator came up to her and said, “I didn’t know that you were naked on the internet, and that makes me feel like I can have a career after this.”
Tech
Australian police design AI tool to decipher predators’ Gen Z slang
Australian police are working on an AI prototype that will help them decipher Gen Z slang and emoji-laden messages written by online predators, a top official said Wednesday.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said social media had become a breeding ground for bullying, sexual exploitation and radicalization.
Police were working with software giant Microsoft to develop a tool that would unravel sinister messages hidden by seemingly innocuous emojis and slang, she said.
“Clever AFP members, with Microsoft, are developing a prototype AI tool that will interpret emojis and Gen Z-and-Alpha slang in encrypted communications.
“This prototype aims to make it quicker for our teams to save children from harm much earlier.”
Barrett also warned about the rise of so-called “crimefluencers”—online predators who used their social media savvy to target young and vulnerable users.
“They are crimefluencers, and they are motivated by anarchy and hurting others, with most of their victims pre-teen or teenage girls,” she said.
Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16.
There is keen interest in whether Australia’s sweeping restrictions can work, as regulators around the globe wrestle with the dangers of social media.
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Tech
Rainfall Buries a Mega-Airport in Mexico
The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. The terminal, designed by Norman Foster—winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009—was going to be the first to obtain LEED platinum certification, the highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.
Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and would leave behind serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region that surrounds Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and altered the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).
Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. “It felt like I was stepping onto Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being placed at the helm of the project. The park covers an area equivalent to 21 times the area of Mexico City’s enormous Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, it’s roughly three times the size of Manhattan.”
The restoration project wasn’t a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been skating around this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration projects that were proposed as early as 1913, including ones by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverría says, “wasn’t a lack of ideas, but of political will.”
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