When N. Lee Plumb was laid off from Amazon last week, he was certain of one thing: it was not because he failed to embrace the company’s artificial intelligence push.

Plumb, who led his team’s “AI enablement” efforts, said he was among the most prolific users of Amazon’s new AI coding tool and had even been flagged internally as one of its top adopters.

His exit came amid Amazon’s announcement of 16,000 corporate layoffs, a move many linked to Chief Executive Andy Jassy’s drive to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

But as with other companies that have recently tied workforce cuts to AI — including Expedia, Pinterest and Dow — it remains unclear whether artificial intelligence is the true driver of job losses or a narrative crafted for investors.

“AI has to drive a return on investment,” said Plumb, who spent eight years at Amazon. “When you reduce headcount, you’ve demonstrated efficiency, you attract more capital, the share price goes up.”

“So you could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce head count, attribute it to AI, and now you’ve got a value story,” he said.

Plumb is an unusual figure among Amazon’s former employees. He is also mounting what he calls a “long shot” run for Congress in Texas, campaigning against what he describes as the tech industry’s reliance on work visas to “replace American workers with cheaper foreign labour.”

Whatever the precise reasons behind his layoff, Plumb’s scepticism toward AI-driven job replacement echoes a broader debate among economists, many of whom say the link between artificial intelligence and mass layoffs remains difficult to prove.

"We just don't know," said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University's business school. "Not because AI isn't great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organisation. People save time, and they get their work done earlier."

If an employer works faster because of AI, Girotra said it takes time to adjust a company's management structure in a way that would enable a smaller workforce. He's not convinced that's happening at Amazon, which he said is still scaling back from a glut of hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report by Goldman Sachs said AI's overall impact on the labour market remains limited, though some effects might be felt in "specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech." Those are fields involving tasks that correlate with the strengths of the current crop of generative AI chatbots that can write emails and marketing pitches, produce synthetic images, answer questions and help write code.

But the bank's economic research division said in its most recent monthly AI adoption tracker that, since December, "very few employees were affected by corporate layoffs attributed to AI," though the report was published Jan. 16, before Amazon, Dow and Pinterest announced their layoffs.

San Francisco-based Pinterest was the most explicit in asserting that AI drove it to cut up to 15 per cent of its workforce. The social media company said it was "making organisational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, we've made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members."

Pinterest echoed that message in a regulatory disclosure that said the company was "reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution."

Expedia has voiced a similar message, but the 162 tech workers the travel website cut from its Seattle headquarters last week included several AI-specific roles, such as machine-learning scientists.

Dow's regulatory disclosures tied its 4,500 layoffs to a new plan "utilising AI and automation" to increase productivity and improve shareholder returns.

Amazon's 16,000 corporate job cuts were part of a broader reduction of employees at the e-commerce giant. At the same time as those cuts, all believed to be office jobs, Amazon said it would cut about 5,000 retail workers, according to notices it sent to state workforce agencies in California, Maryland and Washington, resulting from its decision to close almost all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores.

That's on top of a round of 14,000 job cuts in October, bringing the total to well over 30,000 since Jassy first signalled a push for AI-driven organisational changes.

Like many companies, in technology and otherwise, but particularly those that make and sell AI tools and services, Amazon has been pushing its workforce to find more efficiencies with AI.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that 2026 will be when "AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work."

"We're investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, we're elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams," he said on an earnings call. "We're starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person."

So far, Meta's layoffs this year have focused on cutting jobs from its virtual reality and metaverse divisions. Also driving job impacts is the industry shifting resources to AI development, which requires huge spending on computer chips, energy-hungry data centres, and talent.

Jassy told Amazon employees last June to be "curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team's brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams."

Plumb was fully on board with that and said he demonstrated his proficiency in using Amazon's AI coding tool, Kiro, to "solve massive problems" in the company's compensation system.

"If you weren't using them, your manager would get a report, and they would talk to you about using them," he said. "There were only five people in the entire company who were a higher user of Kiro than I was, or had achieved more milestones."

Now he's shifting gears to his candidacy among a field of Republicans in the Houston area looking to unseat US Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the March primary.

Cornell's Girotra said it's possible that increasing AI productivity is leading companies to cut middle management, but he said the reality is that those making layoff decisions "just need to cut costs and make it happen. That's it. I don't think they care what the reason for that is."

Not all companies are signalling AI as a reason for cuts. Home Depot confirmed on Thursday that it was eliminating 800 roles tied to its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, though most of the affected employees worked remotely.

Home Depot's spokesman, George Lane, said that Home Depot's cuts were not driven by AI or automation but "truly about speed, agility", and serving the needs of its customers and front-line workers.

And exercise equipment maker Peloton confirmed on Friday that it is reducing its workforce by 11 per cent as part of a broader cost-cutting move under its CEO, Peter Stern, to pare down operating expenses.