Amazon.com Inc. is preparing another round of corporate job cuts as early as next week, signaling an ongoing effort by the company to streamline operations and transition priorities to automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

The latest round of layoffs, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg, would follow the company’s October decision to eliminate roughly 14,000 corporate roles worldwide. At the time, Amazon said additional reductions could take place in 2026 as it continued to assess where layers of management could be removed.

Reuters reported the number of cuts expected in the latest round could be “roughly the same as last year,” potentially making the total reduction the largest in the company’s history. That figure would exceed the approximately 27,000 positions Amazon slashed in multiple rounds in 2023.

In an October memo to employees, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said the company was reallocating resources to focus on its most important priorities.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Galetti wrote, adding that it was enabling companies to innovate more rapidly.

Amazon declined to comment on the reports when contacted.

The layoffs have fueled speculation that automation and AI are driving the reductions. Amazon, along with other major technology firms such as Microsoft Corp., has reduced headcounts while significantly increasing investments in AI infrastructure. In Washington state last year, software development engineers represented the largest group of workers affected by Amazon’s layoffs, coinciding with the growing use of AI-powered coding tools.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has previously acknowledged that AI-driven efficiency gains could reduce the company’s corporate workforce over time. However, speaking on an earnings call two days after the October layoffs were announced, Jassy said the cuts were not the result of financial pressure or AI replacing workers. Instead, he attributed them to rapid hiring over the past decade that created excessive layers of management and slowed decision-making.

Jassy, who became CEO in 2021 after founder Jeff Bezos stepped down, has prioritized reducing bureaucracy across the organization. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more restrained hiring strategy.

Amazon last disclosed that its corporate workforce totaled about 350,000 employees in early 2023.

A reduction of approximately 30,000 positions would represent about 8.5% of that group, though it would be a relatively small share of Amazon’s overall workforce of 1.57 million, most of whom are employed in warehouses. Around 50,000 corporate employees work in the Seattle area, where 2,303 corporate roles were cut in October.

Amazon is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Feb. 5. While its stock lagged other Magnificent Seven tech companies last year, some analysts expect growth in its cloud business to benefit from rising demand for AI services.