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The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasnt a failure to get on board with the companys artificial intelligence plans. Plumb, his teams head of AI enablement, says he was so prolific in his use of Amazons new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users. Many assumed Amazon’s 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassys push to reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. But like other companies that have tied workforce changes to AI including Expedia, Pinterest, and Dow last week it can be hard for economists, or individual employees like Plumb, to know if AI is the real reason behind the layoffs or if it’s the message a company wants to tell Wall Street. AI has to drive a return on investment, said Plumb, who worked at Amazon for eight years. When you reduce head count, youve 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 youve got a value story, he said. Amazon said in an emailed statement that AI was not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions. These changes are about continuing to strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy to drive speed and ownership, it said. Plumb is atypical for an Amazon worker in that he’s also running what he describes as a long shot bid for Congress in Texas, on a platform focused on stopping the tech industry’s reliance on work visas to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. But whatever it was that cost Plumb his job, his skepticism about AI-driven job replacement is one shared by many economists. We just don’t know, said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University’s business school. Not because AI isnt great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization. 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 labor 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% of its workforce. The social media company said it was making organizational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, weve 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 utilizing 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 ecommerce 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 signaled a push for AI-driven organizational 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. Were investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, were elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams, he said on an earnings call. Were starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person. So far, Metas 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 centers 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 teams 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 werent using them, your manager would get a report and they would talk to you about using it, he said. There were only five people in the entire company that 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 epublicans in the Houston area looking to unseat U.S. 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. Thats it. I don’t think they care what the reason for that is. Not all companies are signaling 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 Depots spokesman George Lane said that Home Depots 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% as part of a broader cost-cutting move to pare down operating expenses. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer AP Retail Writer Anne DInnocenzio contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
An outbreak of Nipah virus outbreak in India is currently causing alarm for health officials and travelers across a number of countries in Asia. On January 26, health officials from India notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of two laboratory-confirmed cases of Nipah virus (NiV) infection in West Bengal State. No additional NiV cases have been detected. Following news of the outbreak, authorities in some Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, have ramped up airport health screening efforts. However, according to Reuters, the screenings are more for “reassurance” than a tactic to stop the spread. The WHO says risk of spread at the national, regional, and global levels is low. The latest developments Both recent West Bengal cases involved healthcare workers who began showing typical NiV symptoms in late December 2025. The cases were confirmed by Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) testing, according to the WHO. Local health officials identified 196 contacts, all of whom tested negative for NiV and showed no symptoms. NiV is serious, but rare. It is a zoonotic virus, meaning it usually spreads from animals to humans. Fruit bats or flying foxes are natural hosts for the virus. However, the virus can also be transmitted through contaminated food and from person to person through close contact with an infected persons bodily fluids, such as saliva or urine. Person-to-person contact is less common, according to the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training & Education Center (NETEC). Person-to-person transmission is most commonly reported in hospital or healthcare settings. According to the WHO, the case fatality rate is estimated to be 40% to 75%. There are no licensed medications or vaccines for NiV infection, but early supportive care can improve survival. Additional details can be found in the WHO’s January 30 disease outbreak news report. A brief history of the virus NiV was first identified in 1998 in Malaysia during an outbreak among pig farmers. Since then, cases have been reported in less than a handful of countriesBangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. The most recent outbreak marks the third NiV infection outbreak reported in West Bengal.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in 2023, this single-family home at 19374 Rizzuto St. in Venice, FL (34293 ZIP Code) was purchased for $565,000. By the time the transaction closed, the housing market had already begun to enter a period of cyclical coolingwith Florida seeing a sharper power swing to buyers and some pockets of Southwest Florida moving into what ResiClub considers correction mode. By February 2025, the homeowner listed the property above for sale at $519,000. After 4 subsequent price cuts and a brief delisting, the home finally sold in December 2025 for $455,000or -19.5% below its 2023 sales price. While thats certainly a material home price correction from its Pandemic Housing Boom peak, we should note that the December 2025 sales price ($455K) was still +38.7% above the $328,000 price the same property fetched in 2017. As weve closely documented for ResiClub readers for the past few years (heres our past feature on just Punta Gorda), Southwest Florida has been one of the two weakest regional chunks of the U.S. housing market. Among major U.S. metros, only Austin, Texas metro area (-27.3% since its 2022 peak) has seen a larger overall price drop this cycle than metros in Punta Gorda, FL (-25.3% from its 2022 peak), Cape Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL (-18.8% from its 2022 peak), and North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL (-17.4% from its 2022 peak). The North Port-Sarasota metro is where the home highlighted above is located. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the ZIP Code highlighted in todays article (34293) are down -11.3% year-over-year. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the highlighted ZIP Code (34293) are down -21.5% from their 2022 peak. Thats broadly in line with the -19.5% decline at which the highlighted property sold relative to its 2023 price. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the highlighted ZIP Code (34293) are still up +37.3% above March 2020 levels. Thats broadly similar to the +38.7% increase the highlighted property sold for in December 2025 relative to its pre-pandemic sale in 2017 ($328,000). Again, todays ResiClub article is not about a property in a market performing anywhere near the U.S. average right now. Instead, it highlights a market that has been among the weakest since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out. Indeed, U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, entered 2026 at +1.9% above their July 2022 levels. Meanwhile, home prices in the North PortSarasota metrowhere the home in the 34293 ZIP Code is locatedentered 2026 at -17.4% below their July 2022 levels. Click here to view an interactive of the chart below There are several factors that have come together to tilt the supply-demand balance in Southwest Florida more decisively toward homebuyers since the Pandemic Housing Boom ended. One key factor is that home prices in Southwest Florida rose too far, too faststretching housing fundamentals well beyond what local incomes could reasonably support in a region that also happened to have relatively lower building costs and ample entitled land. When the Pandemic Housing Booms domestic migration surgeparticularly the influx of retirees and near-retireesbegan to decelerate, the Southwest Florida market experienced an even bigger demand shock. With fewer in-migrants, Southwest Florida increasingly had to rely on local incomes to support pricesin a market that already had strained fundamentals. At the same time, as market conditions shifted, elevated levels of new single-family andmultifamily supply came online across parts of Southwest Florida. Builders and landlords were forced to offer larger incentives to move product, which pulled some marginal demand away from the resale market and added another layer of cooling. Put more simply: Pockets of Southwest Florida had overshot, and the market needed a period of mean reversion. Click here to view an interactive of the chart below There are other factors, of course. Following the Surfside condo collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, Florida passed new structural safety rules, requiring more inspections and additional funds for repairs to be set aside by the end of 2024. That has led to Florida HOAs issuing sky-high special assessments and monthly HOA fee increases to cover these costs. This has had a greater impact on older coastal Florida condo buildings. Looking ahead, one big question is whether home prices in markets like Punta Gorda and Cape Coral (and metro area Austin, TX) have fallen enough to recapture the attention of homebuyers, mom-and-pop single-family investors, and single-family acquisition capital? Its worth noting that while many pockets of Southwest Florida still have inventory/months of supply levels above the national average, the pace of inventory growth has slowed significantly over the past yearand some areas in SWFL have even begun to see modest year-over-year declines in active listings. Back in spring 2022, while working at Fortune, I suggested that pockets of Southwest Florida could be at greater risk of a home price correction. At the time, Moodys Analytics model believed Punta Gorda, for example, was overvalued by 57.8%. The correction Punta Gorda has gone through since thencoupled with additional income gainsmeans the market is now only overvalued by 9.0%, according to Moodys model. In other words, the ongoing correction in Southwest Florida has significantly reduced downside risk going forward relative to where things stood a few years ago.
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E-Commerce
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