LinkedIn, Cisco and Amazon are the latest tech companies laying off more workers

Job cuts are hammering the tech industry as companies ramp up investments in artificial intelligence.

This week, San Jose-based tech company Cisco said it was cutting fewer than 4,000 jobs or less than 5% of its workforce. Cisco announced the layoffs the same day that the company reported that it grew its revenue to $15.8 billion and net income to $3.4 billion for the third quarter ending in April.

Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins told employees in an email that he’s “confident” that the company will “win in the AI era” but that requires “focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest.”

“This means making hard decisions — about where we invest, how we’re organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us,” he told employees in the email, which was published on Cisco’s website.

Cisco provides products and services in areas such as networking, cybersecurity and remote work.

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, a professional social network that people use to apply to jobs, is also laying off workers.

Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported on Wednesday that LinkedIn was laying off 5% of its staff or roughly 875 people.

“As part of our regular business planning, we’ve implemented organizational changes to best position ourselves for future success,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said in a statement.

In a memo published on Business Insider, LinkedIn Chief Executive Daniel Shapero told employees that the cuts would impact its global business organization, marketing and engineering teams. The company, he said, is also focusing on operating “more profitably.”

“We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs,” he said in the memo.

Amazon, which said in January it was slashing 16,000 jobs, is also making cuts in its selling partner services team. The company didn’t say how many people were laid off.

“We regularly review our organizations to ensure we’re best set up to deliver on our goals. Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a relatively small number of roles in our Selling Partner Services team. We don’t take decisions like this lightly, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees with transitional health care, a separation payment, and outsourced job placement services,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

The cuts come as other major tech companies this year, including Meta, Block, Oracle and others, lay off thousands of workers.

Cloudflare and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase have also recently announced job cuts. Cloudflare’s job cuts included laying off 224 people in its San Francisco headquarters, a notice to the California Employment Development Department shows.

Some tech companies, which are also selling AI-powered products, are saying that workers can accomplish more with fewer people by using AI to generate code and complete tasks. Others have cited restructuring and cost-cutting to offset the billions of dollars they’re spending on AI infrastructure.