Just as leaked Amazon documents hinted at robots replacing half a million warehouse jobs, the e-commerce behemoth instead slashed 14,000 middle-manager positions—offering a stark preview of AI's true labor impact: not gutting hands-on factory roles as feared, but eroding the white-collar layers that oversee them.
Amazon revealed on Tuesday that it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate roles, roughly 4% of its office-based staff, in a push to "reduce bureaucracy" and "remove organizational layers," per an internal memo. Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience, framed the cuts as a way to streamline operations amid surging investments in generative AI. In essence, it's a wager that AI can absorb the coordination, reporting, and decision-making duties long handled by human managers.
CEO Andy Jassy has been candid about this shift over the past year. "We’ll need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today," he told staff earlier, pointing to generative AI's expanding role in planning, analytics, and forecasting. These tools, he noted, are already enabling teams to "move faster and make better decisions."
This rationale is rippling through corporate America. Generative AI excels at the routine middle-management grind: compiling updates, drafting memos, generating reports, and condensing meetings.
It's not confirmed whether Tuesday's layoffs stem directly from AI supplanting these roles more effectively—or cheaply—than people. But for cost-conscious leaders eager to boost efficiency, the allure of a flatter structure is undeniable.
The irony is rich: Amazon, the trailblazer in warehouse robotics and symbol of blue-collar automation fears, is now showing that white-collar workers may bear AI's initial brunt. Gartner analysts predict that by 2026, one in five companies will deploy AI to halve their management tiers.
The timing exacerbates challenges for workers, especially entry-level ones climbing the ranks. In September, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell noted hiring has "slowed noticeably," particularly for early-career talent. He and economists describe a "low-hire, low-fire" economy, where firms hesitate to expand headcount despite steady growth.
"If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told the Wall Street Journal. "I see a lot of companies preemptively holding the line, forecasting, and hoping that they can have smaller workforces."
Amazon is hardly isolated. This week, Target unveiled its first major layoffs in a decade, axing nearly 2,000 jobs. Paramount, post-merger with Skydance, is cutting 1,000 roles amid its own overhaul.
If AI collapses hierarchies, fostering a "low-hire, high-fire" landscape, it could dismantle traditional career paths and ripple destructively through the economy. That's the scenario in the latest Challenger, Gray & Christmas report from October 2. The firm tracked 946,000 announced U.S. job cuts year-to-date—the most since 2020—with over 17,000 linked directly to AI and 20,000 more to automation or "technological updates." Tech companies alone have cut 108,000 jobs in 2025, while retail layoffs surged 203% year-over-year amid holiday slowdown fears.
"It’s very likely job cut plans are going to surpass a million for the first time since 2020," said Andy Challenger, the firm's senior VP. "Previous periods with this many job cuts occurred either during recessions or, as was the case in 2005 and 2006, during the first wave of automations that cost jobs in manufacturing and technology."
GM Lays Off 1,700 Workers as EV Demand Falls Short of Projections
General Motors laid off approximately 1,700 workers across Michigan and Ohio on Wednesday, citing a slowdown in the electric vehicle market.
The Breakdown:
→ 1,200 layoffs at Detroit’s EV plant
→ 550 cuts at Ohio’s Ultium Cells battery plant
→ 850 temporary layoffs at the same Ohio site
→ 700 temporary layoffs at Tennessee’s Ultium Cells plant
GM will temporarily pause battery cell production at its Ohio and Tennessee facilities starting in January, with operations expected to resume by mid-2026 for facility upgrades.
“In response to slower near-term EV adoption and an evolving regulatory environment, General Motors is realigning EV capacity,” the company said.
Translation: Consumer demand hasn’t matched the production capacity being built. GM overestimated how quickly buyers would shift to EVs and now needs to recalibrate.
The Broader Picture:
This adds pressure to an already stressed job market and gives the Fed another data point on employment trends. Manufacturing layoffs in Michigan and Ohio carry economic and political significance beyond the numbers.
For the EV sector, GM’s pullback raises questions about adoption timelines. If one of America’s largest automakers is cutting capacity, the rapid transition many projected may be taking longer than expected.
Tesla’s vertically integrated model continues to look more resilient compared to legacy automakers retrofitting entire supply chains.
Property owners raced to refinance their home loans last week as mortgage interest rates fell to their lowest point in over a year, new data out Wednesday shows. Refinance demand climbed 9% every week and 111% compared to the same time last year. Between existing homeowners and potential buyers, overall mortgage application volume was up 7.1% over the previous week. Markets, meanwhile, are keenly focused on Wednesday’s interest rate announcement from the Federal Reserve, as the government shutdown limits the availability of federal data.
Nvidia NVDA 2.66%
became the first company to hit $5 trillion in market value, the latest milestone in an unprecedented surge that reflects the growing influence of artificial intelligence on markets and the economy.
The chip maker’s stock traded as high as $212.19, according to FactSet, ahead of the $205.76 needed for a $5 trillion valuation, before giving up some gains in the early afternoon.
Shares have been boosted by exuberance for AI’s potential and a recent flurry of deals and partnerships with some of the biggest companies in AI and corporate America, from OpenAI and Oracle to Nokia and drugmaker Eli Lilly. Enthusiasm for Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang’s speech in Washington, D.C., also juiced gains this week.
“They’re the linchpin of this entire AI trade,” said Angelo Zino, senior vice president at CFRA Research.
Nvidia is now larger than AMD, Arm Holdings ARM -0.70%, ASML, Broadcom, Intel, Lam Research LRCX 3.73%, Micron, Qualcomm, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing combined, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Its value also exceeds entire sectors of the S&P 500, including utilities, industrials, and consumer staples.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company designs chips, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power the AI industry, placing it at the heart of the boom that has carried stocks to record after record. The company said Tuesday that it had already shipped 6 million of the Blackwell chips it released last year and has orders for 14 million more.
Nvidia’s climb casts the AI trade in stark relief: the company first topped $2 trillion in March 2024 and hit $3 trillion just 66 trading sessions later. By July 2025, it was the world’s first $4 trillion company, racing ahead of rivals Apple and Microsoft, both of which touched the $4 trillion mark for the first time on Tuesday.
“Nvidia’s stock is a barometer for this massive demand cycle,” Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, said in an email. He called Huang the “godfather of AI.”
The gains in AI stocks have been so strong that some investors, technology executives, and industry analysts have begun to raise the prospect of a bubble akin to the dot-com boom and bust. Technology companies are pouring hundreds of billions into data center development and chips and taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny.
In September, Nvidia agreed to invest up to $100 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which would allow the startup to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for its AI data centers. Nvidia has also backed a host of AI startups. If heavy spending on the AI race wanes, some worry that Nvidia could be hit twice, with less revenue and a declining value of its equity investments in customers.
Another question is what kind of access Nvidia will have to the Chinese market. China’s access to Nvidia chips has been part of past negotiations and is seen as a potential bargaining chip for Trump in his meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in South Korea.
The “remarkable valuation” sets high expectations for the company, said David Kotok, co-founder of Cumberland Advisors. “It is justified only if margins and profits continue on the current trajectory or even get better.”
Indeed, Nvidia’s valuation is elevated relative to the rest of the market. The company’s shares trade at around 33 times next year’s projected earnings, compared with an average price-to-earnings ratio of 24 for the S&P 500.
The chip maker still trails some of the more eye-watering valuations in the tech industry: Tesla is trading at more than 210 times next year’s earnings. Palantir’s P/E ratio is even higher.
Nvidia is set to report third-quarter earnings on Nov. 19, an event that has become a kind of Super Bowl for investors. Reports from fellow tech titans Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft are due Wednesday after market close.
The demand for Nvidia’s chips is fervent enough that some analysts still consider the stock a bargain at its current price. At Tuesday’s event, Huang said the company expects half a trillion dollars in total sales over the next five quarters.
“I don’t want to say ‘cheap’—but this is a name that still has a reasonable valuation given the opportunities ahead,” Zino said.
The German government officially approved its largest minimum wage increase since the policy's introduction a decade ago, with the hourly rate set to rise from €12.82 to €14.60 by January 2027 in a move that will benefit approximately six million workers across Europe's largest economy.