Amazon is reducing its corporate workforce by about 14,000 roles, the company announced Tuesday in an internal note to employees from Amazon Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti. The company will notify impacted teams and individuals Tuesday, but did not provide details about the types of positions impacted. Amazon’s latest round of layoffs builds on CEO Andy Jassy’s remarks to employees in June that the company will need fewer people doing some existing jobs as generative AI continues to advance.  Galetti told employees on Tuesday that the workforce cuts are intended to reduce bureaucracy, remove corporate layers and shift resources as the company works to stay “nimble.” “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” Galetti said in her note to employees. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”

In brief: Mailers got some good news this month when the Postal Regulatory Commission limited the USPS to a once-a-year rate increase for Market Dominant products through 2030. The freight market is keeping a close eye on how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule about the legality of some Trump administration tariffs. Producers of uncoated freesheet paper are citing reduced capacity and increased demand as the basis for price increases that are set to take effect in February and March.

For the past few years, marketers have repeated the same line: Data is the new oil. The saying is tidy, but it made more sense in the era when data scarcity was a major challenge. The companies that were seen as winners were the ones that extracted the most data and analytics. But today, scarcity is no longer the issue — far from it. Every modern brand has more customer data than it knows what to do with. The constraint isn’t collection anymore; it’s analyzing and extracting insights to produce meaningful actions that can transform the business. A more accurate comparison is to say that data is uranium. It is one of the most powerful assets a business has when refined with the right containment. Left unattended, disconnected from a clear strategy or handled without discipline, it does damage. Poorly used data can easily become a wasted budget, eroded customer trust or bad decisions that are made with confidence, but no real insight behind them.