India, Feb. 2 -- Layoffs in the thousands by Amazon, Oracle and other tech-focused companies are routinely being blamed on Artificial Intelligence (AI), but affected workers and analysts see reasons beyond and behind it.

"AI has to drive a return on investment," said N Lee Plumb, his team's head of "AI enablement" in Amazon, commented on the reasons after being laid off.

Plumb said he knows for sure that being laid off from Amazon last week was not a failure to get on board with the company's AI plans. He told news agency AP that he was so prolific in his use of Amazon's new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users.

Many assumed Amazon's 16,000 corporate layoffs reflected CEO Andy Jassy's push to "reduce our ...