Amazon’s Alexa business is laying off “several hundred” employees, including those on its recently launched artificial general intelligence team, Business Insider has learned.
On Friday, Amazon’s VP of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch told his team about the layoffs, saying it’s intended to shift the company’s resources to focus on generative AI.
“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated,” Rausch wrote in the email, obtained by BI.
Rohit Prasad, SVP of the Artificial General Intelligence team, followed up with a separate email, saying his team, which launched in July, would be impacted as well.
“Some of our teammates that work on Alexa-related efforts will be impacted by role reductions today, including members of the AGI organization,” Prasad wrote.
“While this was a hard decision to make, we remain very optimistic about the future of Alexa,” an Amazon spokesperson told BI. “As we move forward, Alexa remains an incredibly important part of our business, and we will continue to invest and innovate to deliver on our vision.”
Geekwire first reported on the broader job cuts, but the reductions impacting the AGI team have not been previously reported.
The job cuts are the latest round of layoffs at Amazon. Amazon cut roughly 27,000 jobs since late last year across the company, as part of a massive cost reduction effort. Earlier this week, Amazon’s game division cut 180 more jobs.
The move continues to impact Amazon’s Alexa unit, which has suffered from slow growth and low morale in recent years. The Alexa team was one of the hardest-hit units during the earlier round of layoffs, and is seeing major changes within the unit as generative AI has become a bigger priority than the once-popular voice-assistant technology. Dave Limp, the longtime leader of Alexa and the devices team recently left the company, and was replaced by ex-Microsoft executive Panos Panay. Amazon created the new AGI team this summer, as part of the company’s effort to take advantage of the AI-boom, spearheaded by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Prasad now reports directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, as BI previously reported.
Rausch, Alexa’s VP, said in his email on Friday that Amazon remains “very optimistic” about the future of Alexa. But he also stressed that the recent effort to infuse more AI into Alexa’s voice technology has been a major challenge.
“While this was a hard decision to make, we remain very optimistic about the future of Alexa. I want to reiterate that Alexa remains an incredibly important part of our business,” Rausch wrote in the email. “Incorporating a new large language model into a voice-forward, personal AI, has been and continues to be an enormous scientific and engineering challenge.”
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