Pinterest shares got slammed Tuesday, dropping more than 10%, after the company said it’s laying off nearly 15% of its workforce and cutting back on real estate.
That’s hundreds of jobs gone. It’s all happening as Pinterest rushes to plug artificial intelligence into everything it does.
The company said in a securities filing that the layoffs will be wrapped up by late September, just as the third quarter closes. At last count, Pinterest had over 4,500 employees globally.
These cuts mean roughly 600 to 675 workers will be gone before fall. They’re also expecting to take a $35 to $45 million hit in pre-tax restructuring charges. Most of it will come from severance costs and scaling back office leases.
Pinterest puts AI at the center, restructures marketing and sales
This isn’t just a round of layoffs. Pinterest made it clear it’s shifting its entire structure to revolve around AI. It said it’s “reallocating resources” to AI-heavy teams and cutting from areas that don’t align with that goal. That includes reworking how the company handles sales and marketing. AI is now the main character.
Pinterest said it’s focused on building out AI-powered features. Back in October, it launched a tool called the “Pinterest Assistant,” meant to help users shop on the platform with smarter search. And for advertisers, the platform has started pushing automated ad tech, designed to make it easier for marketers to get results with less manual setup.
CEO Bill Ready claimed in November that, “Our investments in AI and product innovation are paying off.” He called Pinterest a leader in visual search and said it’s now an AI-powered shopping assistant for 600 million people. That’s a big number. But Wall Street didn’t bite. The stock still tanked, and investors clearly didn’t love the restructuring news.
It’s not just Pinterest doing this. Over the past year, about 55,000 U.S. workers lost their jobs due to AI-related shifts, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Companies across industries are cutting people and replacing them with AI tools that can do tasks faster and cheaper. Whether that’s really true or just a slick excuse is still up for debate.
Amazon plans another 15,000 job cuts, ties it loosely to AI
The wave of AI-related layoffs isn’t stopping at Pinterest. Amazon is planning a second round of corporate cuts next week, aiming for a total of 30,000 office jobs cut. Two sources familiar with the company’s internal discussions said the next wave could hit as early as Tuesday.
Amazon already axed 14,000 white-collar jobs back in October, and at the time, tied the cuts to the rise of AI software. They told staff that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet.” That line showed up in internal memos, clearly trying to frame the layoffs as innovation-driven.
But then CEO Andy Jassy walked that back during a third-quarter call. He said the job cuts weren’t really about money or AI. “It’s culture,” he said. He blamed layers of bureaucracy and said Amazon just had too many people doing the same thing. In his words: “You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”
Back in early 2025, Jassy already warned that Amazon’s corporate headcount would shrink as AI tools got better. That’s now playing out. More companies are using AI bots to automate tasks, cut headcount, and trim costs. During its December AWS event, Amazon rolled out new AI models to show off just how fast things are changing.
Still, the full 30,000 job cuts make up less than 2% of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees. Most of Amazon’s workforce is still in warehouses and fulfillment centers, so the layoffs mainly hit corporate roles.
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