Did artificial intelligence really drive layoffs at Amazon, other firms? It can be hard to tell

The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure is that being laid off from Amazon last week was not due to a failure to embrace the company’s artificial intelligence push.

Plumb, the head of his team’s “AI enablement,” says he was among the most prolific users of Amazon’s new AI coding tool. In fact, he was flagged internally as one of the platform’s top users.

Yet Plumb was still among the 16,000 corporate employees laid off by Amazon last week, cuts many assumed reflected CEO Andy Jassy’s stated aim to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”