• Amazon cut jobs in its Books business, according to an internal email.
• The company started by selling books online in the 1990s.
• This remains a large business for the e-commerce giant.

Amazon is cutting jobs in its Books business, according to an internal email viewed by Business Insider on Thursday.

"Today, we are taking the very difficult step of eliminating some roles on your team," a senior Amazon manager wrote in the email. "Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated. This decision was not made lightly, and Books leadership and the HR team are here to support you through this transition."

The email stated employees will receive full pay and benefits for the next 60 days, or 90 days for employees in New York or New Jersey, plus additional severance.

"As part of our ongoing work to make our teams and programs operate more efficiently, and to better align with our business roadmap, we've made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles within the Books organization," an Amazon spokesperson said. "We don't make these decisions lightly, and we're committed to supporting affected employees through their transitions."

The cuts affected fewer than 100 employees. The tech giant isn't reducing the size of its Books business because the roles will be repurposed for other parts of the company, according to Amazon.

Amazon got started by selling books online in the 1990s. While the company closed its physical stores in 2022, the online business remained big. Amazon sold $16.9 billion worth of books in the first 10 months of 2022, BI previously reported.

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• HR software company Lattice is unleashing new AI agents for the workplace.
• The new features transform the tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.
• Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, told BI that embracing AI now would help protect jobs.

AI is already entering the workplace, so how should employees make sure it doesn't take their jobs?

For HR software company Lattice, the answer is to embrace it now and get ahead.

Last month, the company announced it was launching an AI agent designed to help HR teams. The agent would effectively give employees a digital copilot to answer questions about payroll, benefits, and other things they might usually message a human about.

On Tuesday, Lattice announced it's rolling out more features to transform these tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.

They'll sit in on 1:1 meetings with your manager. They'll nudge you if they think an employee is disengaged and at risk of leaving the company. They'll let you practice difficult questions before having them with other employees.

Notably, Lattice is applying those same techniques to other business departments beyond HR, with what it's calling an "agent platform." Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told Business Insider that IT and finance are two areas where these agents could be most helpful.

"I have an executive assistant as the CEO of a company, but my regular line engineer does not have an executive assistant," said Franklin. Lattice's proposal is: what if they did?

AI agents are a big theme in the corporate world right now. As the underlying AI models continue to improve rapidly, generative AI tools that can actually carry out helpful tasks and act more proactively are becoming more of a reality. But Franklin says many companies are struggling to make that leap.

"A lot of people are stuck at the starting line of, 'how do I get this going for my employees, rather than just having a ChatGPT window?'" she said.

The elephant in the room

While Franklin says Lattice is trying to get AI to enhance employees, rather than find ways of replacing them, plenty of companies are trying to get AI to take on white-collar jobs.

Franklin believes using AI to replace repetitive daily manual tasks, such as answering employee questions about payroll or health insurance plans, will free employees up for more "strategic" thinking.

She doesn't deny that some companies will look to use these AI tools to replace some humans, but she also said that's not what Lattice is trying to do. Instead, she sees the ability to offload menial tasks to AI as a way to make employees more productive and useful.

"We're not able to have people focused on the things that are really important because they're too busy doing the stuff that is logistical and not strategic," she said.

Franklin says there will always be a human in the loop and that Lattice's AI agents won't act on their "proactive" recommendations, such as contacting an employee who has missed a deadline, without a warm body giving the OK. Some companies that were bullish on AI, such as Klarna, have about-turned in recent months after discovering that taking humans out of the loop backfired.

It's a sign of just how unchartered these waters are. Lattice itself knows: jump back 10 months, and the company found itself in a media storm after announcing a new tool to let companies onboard AI "employees" and even give them official employment records.

It didn't go over well, and Lattice later walked back the release, but Franklin still believes the idea at heart was correct.

"We need to treat them as employees that aren't ghosts," she told BI. That means holding AI agents to the same standards as human employees when it comes to security, compliance, and performance, she added, "so we have a deep understanding of how these entities are behaving."

This, she said, will be important to preventing AI from just taking human jobs outright. It's an optimistic take, and it might prove to be correct. But there's also fear right now that AI agents will soon be good enough to wipe out many white-collar jobs. In some cases, they are already doing so.

"People have fear, uncertainty, doubt — this is why the time is now where we must all go through this change management, know how to be proficient, fluent, and elevated with AI so we're not replaceable," said Franklin.

"We prevent this by being proactive, by seeing the future and getting to it first."

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• Harvey committed $150 million to Azure cloud services over two years.
• The startup, which builds software for lawyers, has partnered with Microsoft since at least 2024.
• Harvey's expansion includes clients like Comcast and Verizon, and new foundation model integrations.

Legaltech startup Harvey has agreed to a two-year, $150 million commitment to use Azure cloud services, according to an internal email seen by Business Insider.

Jay Parikh, who leads Microsoft's new CoreAI unit, included the deal in an internal memo, writing that his unit "announced expanded partnership with Harvey Al with a 2-year $150M MACC and $3.5M unified expansion." Parikh joined Microsoft in October to lead a new engineering group responsible for building its artificial-intelligence tools.

Microsoft declined to comment, and Harvey declined to comment on the agreement.

MACC, or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, is an agreement customers make to spend a specific amount on Azure for a period of time, often for a discount.

Harvey, which builds chatbots and agents tailored for legal and professional services, is scaling up and entering the enterprise market. It's adding legal teams at Comcast and Verizon as clients, while developing bespoke workflow software for large law firm customers.

It has raised more than $500 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and OpenAI Startup Fund, a Harvey spokesperson told BI.

Harvey has closely partnered with Microsoft since at least early 2024. That year, the company deployed its platform on Microsoft Azure, followed by a Word plug-in designed for lawyers. It also introduced a SharePoint integration, allowing users to securely access files from their Microsoft storage system through Harvey's apps.

For years, Harvey, founded in 2022, ran its platform on OpenAI models, primarily because they're hosted in Microsoft's data centers, Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told BI last month. Law firms handle highly sensitive information and trusted Microsoft to keep it safe, Weinberg said.

"Law firms refused to use anything that wasn't through Azure," Weinberg said. That's now changing, he said, as vendors like Anthropic build the features enterprises require.

Last week, Harvey expanded its use of foundation models to Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.

Still, Harvey's $150 million Azure deal signals it's not backing away from Microsoft anytime soon. The company's growing cloud footprint suggests that, while other partners are gaining traction with the legaltech start, Azure remains integral to Harvey's growth for now.

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• Hedra, a generative AI platform, creates images, video, and audio, with a focus on characters.
• Hedra raised $32 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund.
• Read the pitch deck the startup used to raise its latest funding.

A video of a baby interviewing a dog on a podcast went viral last month.

No, it wasn't real. It was an AI-generated video created by comedian Jon Lajoie, who used Hedra, an AI video generation platform, to make the animation.

Hedra's platform allows users to generate images, video, and audio with its web-based content creation studio.

"Our model and technology focuses on the most controllable, compelling characters, whether that's a hyperrealistic human or an animated character or even an animal," Hedra's CEO, Michael Lingelbach, told Business Insider.

On Thursday, Hedra announced that it raised a $32 million Series A fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund. The round included returning investors such as A16z Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.

Since its launch in 2024, the AI video startup has rapidly raised capital. In August, it announced a $10 million seed investment round. In March, Amazon's Alexa Fund announced that it invested in the startup and several other AI companies. Hedra said it has raised a total of $44 million but has not disclosed a valuation.

Competition in the generative AI is hot, with buzzy companies like Captions, HeyGen, Synthesia, and Runway building tech around video and avatars (Hedra specified that it is not an avatar company).

"We're not trying to compete with Google Veo, we're not trying to compete with Sora," Lingelbach said. "We're focusing really firmly on building the best character models, and that's something that with this additional capital we can make another step function in doing."

Hedra's Character-3 "omnimodal" model combines images, text, and audio to generate video. Creating a character with Hedra begins by uploading an image and then uploading audio that they've either already recorded (like a podcast) or generated using text-to-speech models like ElevenLabs.

"Both voice and video are seeing rapid evolution right now," Lingelbach said. "We took a big leap forward on naturalness of expression with our current model."

Hedra's platform is also users to integrate outside models like ElevenLabs, Google Veo, and Flux "all in one workflow," Lingelbach said.

Expanding beyond the creator economy

Hedra's core user base has been professional creators and marketers, Lingelbach said.

"We're already seeing a massive influx of AI-generated content," Lingelbach said. "My Instagram and TikTok feed are filled with various memes and also more serious content now that's AI-generated."

From comedy skits to faceless creator content to … talking babies, Hedra's already seen a wide range of use cases. Podcast content, particularly, has been a popular application of Hedra's tech.

"It's not really something that we anticipated initially, but it definitely has been driving a lot of our usage," he said.

In addition to the viral trend of AI baby-hosted podcasts that people have been creating using Hedra, others have used Hedra to create Studio Ghibli-style videos of the classic podcast interview clip.

With its recent raise, Hedra plans to expand into more enterprise marketing applications, expand its team, and open an office in New York City.

Read the pitch deck Hedra used to raise its Series A:

Note: Some slides have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.

Hedra is focused on storytelling and characters.

Here's what the slide says:

Every good story is crafted around characters.
But until now, creating compelling characters has been the most challenging part of content creation.

The deck explains Hedra's 'omnimodal foundation model' that lets people quickly generate digital characters.

Here's what the slide says:

At Hedra, we've built the world's best character performance model that uniquely combines video, voice, motion, and emotion in a way never before possible.

• Hedra's Character-3 model is the world's first omnimodal foundation model in production.
• The only model that supports human, animated, and animal characters. And it works with any angle or framing.
• Built to prioritize efficiently scaling unified models
• The entire model was developed with a budget of under $2 million

Hedra's customers range from everyday consumers to creators and marketers.

Here's what the slide says:

We've seen three key customer segments rely on Hedra for their various character performance needs.

Consumers

Consumers love the fun content they can create on Hedra — ranging from memes to music videos to short films.

Prosumers

Prosumers are using Hedra for use cases such as video podcasts, social media, and developing IP.

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams are using Hedra to create UGC, product tutorials, and other content to drive sales conversions.

Hedra has plans to expand into more enterprise offerings.

Here's what the slide says:

And we've already gotten heavy inbound interest from businesses for professional use and have signed notable early enterprise customers.

Upcoming Enterprise Features:

• Teams management
• IP Guards
• Enterprise-level security

The deck highlights Hedra's research team and its proprietary tech.

Here's what the slide says:

Hedra is poised to be the first company to shatter the "uncanny valley."

• We have a best-in-class research team that enables us to train proprietary omnimodal models that no competitor can develop
• We're a product focused company that builds foundation models for real world applications, listens to our users, and ships frequently.
• We're a capital efficient team that built Character-3 on under $2M in capital and a small research team.

Then the deck introduces the team.

Here's what the slide says:

We've assembled the best team to own this category — marrying deep research with AI-Native product design.

Key Leadership Team:

Michael Lingelbach: Founder / CEO

• Stanford PhD student of Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. Senior author of 3 real-time diffusion papers. Recipient of prestigious Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Hongwei Yi: Head of Research

• Former PhD Student of Michael Black, principal researcher behind first audio to video diffusion model to hit the market in the US.

Wei Li: Research Lead

• Core contributor to Google Bard/Gemini, PaLM-2 and T5, with 8+ years experience at Google Brain/Deepmind.

Jason Wilson: Head of Engineering

• Previously led engineering at Nava Benefits (Thrive-backed Series B startup) and engineering manager at Descartes Labs.

Alan Guo: Chief of Staff

• MBA from Harvard Business School. Previously worked in growth & strategy at Disney, Jubilee Media, and Firework.

Ramin Keene: Principal Engineer

• Former CTO at StockX and two-time founder.

Hedra concludes its deck by saying 'we're just getting started.'

Here's what the slide says:

We're on a mission to build the world's best end-to-end storytelling platform. And we're just getting started.

• We've already built the world's leading character performance model on just a $2M budget.
• Prosumers, consumers, and enterprise marketers love and depend on us for their content.
• We're now working on even larger feature releases that will reinvent creation workflows.

It ends with a thank you slide.

This includes contact information for its CEO.