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Nike plans to cut 775 employees in a push to accelerate automation

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  • Nike plans to cut 775 jobs at its distribution centers in Tennessee and Mississippi.
  • The layoffs aim to streamline operations amid supply chain and tech enhancements.
  • Companies, including Amazon and HP, have cited tech advancements among the reasons for recent layoffs.

Sportswear giant Nike is set to cut hundreds of jobs as it consolidates its US distribution center operations.

The company said it plans to let go of 775 employees across Tennessee and Mississippi, citing efforts to “streamline” operations. Nike operates warehouses in both states.

“We are sharpening our supply chain footprint, accelerating the use of advanced technology and automation, and investing in the skills our teams need for the future,” Nike said in a statement to Business Insider on Monday.

The move is a part of CEO Elliott Hill’s larger comeback plan, known as the “win now” strategy, which aims to return Nike’s revenue to growth. Hill took over the sportswear giant in October 2024 as it faced significant challenges, including declining sales and increased pressure from rivals.

Nike made previous cuts in 2024 and last year, reducing its corporate workforce by 1% in 2025 as part of its realignment plan under Hill. The senior leadership team also saw a shake-up in 2025, with Nike eliminating the chief technology officer and chief commercial officer roles, among other changes.

In its statement, Nike said it’s taking steps to move faster, serve consumers better, and reduce the complexity of its operations footprint. The company had about 77,800 employees worldwide as of May.

The latest cuts come as concerns that AI will replace human workers grow stronger, with companies like HP and Amazon citing AI-related efficiency as a factor in recent workforce reductions. A recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that AI’s skills overlap with over 11.7% of the US labor market.

The company said it expects the reduction to support its “path back to long-term, profitable growth.”




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China’s AI push is about spreading economic gains, not enriching tech giants, a finance CEO says

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Open source — that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy.

Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models and broad deployment to spread AI’s gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants.

Speaking at a Davos panel on China’s “AI+ Economy” strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country’s approach reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

“You look at the open structure of the China AI philosophy — then you have the non-open structure,” Alrayes said. “That signals that the benefit they want to see is to trickle down into the economy, into the companies.”

Open source as economic strategy

China’s most prominent AI breakout, DeepSeek, reflects that philosophy.

It mostly uses open-source models that have drawn global attention, in contrast to many large US language models that remain closed and proprietary, reaping the benefits of tightly controlled commercial ecosystems.

Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has said that a key reason behind DeepSeek’s success is its open-source model, which, he said, can outperform proprietary models in terms of efficiency and innovation by building on shared research.

Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that China’s open-source AI models could gain an edge globally because they’re free, making them more attractive than costly proprietary US systems for governments and countries that can’t afford closed models.

Similarly, Alrayes said, China — in pursuing the open model — is aiming for affordability and scale.

“It’s not the benefit of that company, of that product, the return of that individual. It’s not an individual — it’s an economy,” Alrayes said.

That philosophy is reflected in China’s national “AI Plus” action plan, which prioritizes diffusion, said fellow panelist Gong Ke, executive director of the Chinese Institute for New Generation AI Development Strategies at Nankai University.

The policy, he said, focuses on embedding AI across manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education, and other sectors, rather than on breakthroughs such as artificial general intelligence.

He added that the plan sets explicit adoption targets, with AI agents and intelligent terminals expected to reach 70% penetration by 2027 and 90% by 2030.

AI as infrastructure, not a profit engine

Alrayes said China’s open-source tilt ultimately reflects a broader goal: making AI an economic utility rather than a profit center for a small group of companies.

“China is looking to create value throughout the economy, very clear, with very specific objectives across the economy,” he said. “Not just as a benefit to those companies. This is the difference in the philosophy.”




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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Trump’s Greenland push is about avoiding a ‘hot war’

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says President Donald Trump is serious about annexing Greenland.

Trump amped up the rhetoric on Saturday, announcing on Truth Social that the United States would impose new tariffs on Denmark, which controls Greenland, and other European countries unless they hand Greenland over.

Speaking to Kristen Welker on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Bessent said Trump’s push to take over Greenland was not an empty land grab but a strategy to prevent future conflict.

“The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency,” Bessent said. “It is a strategic decision by the president. This is a geopolitical decision, and he’s able to use the economic might of the US to avoid a hot war, so why wouldn’t we do that?”

Greenland is strategically located in the Arctic, acting as a buffer between North America and Russia. It is also home to minerals important to the manufacturing of future technologies.

Trump has recently said that at least part of his reasoning for wanting to annex Greenland is so it can house his Golden Dome missile defense project.

“The president is trying to avoid a conflict,” Bessent said.

That project remains in early planning stages, however, and Denmark has never said it wouldn’t allow Golden Dome infrastructure on its territory. The United States already has a military base in Greenland.

The spectre that the United States — recently emboldened by its surprise raid on Venezuela that netted its leader, Nicolás Maduro, allowing it to move to open the country’s oil industry — could force Europe’s hand by targeting its economy or even take Greenland by force, has rankled US allies across the Atlantic.

European Union leaders held an emergency meeting on Sunday, during which they called Trump’s tariff threat economic blackmail.

“Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” the eight EU nations targeted by Trump said in a joint statement released on Sunday.




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Will Amazon and Walmart’s push for 30-minute delivery actually pay off? We debate.

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The ultrafast delivery wars are heating up.

Amazon said last week that it’s testing a 30-minute delivery option in Seattle and Philadelphia, while Walmart said it managed to fulfill a Black Friday order in 10 minutes and is expanding its drone service to the Atlanta area.

The race is on to get online orders to shoppers’ doorsteps as fast as possible, but we can’t help but wonder as companies pour money into the infrastructure to support it: Is 30-minute delivery overhyped or under-appreciated?

Business Insider’s senior retail reporters Alex Bitter, who primarily covers gig work apps and groceries, and Dominick Reuter, who mainly covers big box stores, sat down to hash it out.

Dominick: I’d say 30-minute delivery is the future. Are you saying it’s an already-failed past?

Alex: The fundamentals are not there. Unless there’s some massive other piece that we’re not seeing, I don’t get why Amazon is doing this.

Dominick: I definitely think it only works as part of a larger strategy where this service builds and strengthens customer relationships. It does not fly on its own.

Alex: A few years ago, we saw some startups try to do something very similar. You had companies like Gorillas — a German grocery delivery concept — pop up to deliver items in 15 minutes.

It was the same pitch: Is there an ingredient or two that you forgot for dinner tonight? No problem. We’ll deliver it to your door, fast.

Now, though, many of those startups either no longer exist or have scaled back significantly. Getir, an ultrafast delivery company from Turkey, left the US. Gopuff is still around and raising money, though reportedly at a lower valuation than it did during the height of the pandemic.

Grocery is already one of the lowest-margin categories in retail. With delivery this fast, you’re making it even less profitable.

To be fair, Amazon has a lot more money and experience than those startups did. But that does not change the fundamental truth that this is a challenging business model.

Dominick: Scale is everything here — the biggest players have a shot at making this successful. Even though it didn’t work out for the startups, their very existence shows the consumer demand for fast service.

But it takes such an astonishing volume of inventory to support that speed of fulfillment. Companies like Amazon or Walmart already have that inventory, which eliminates one of the biggest hurdles to making 30-minute delivery work.

It’s working in China, it’s working in India, and it’s gaining momentum in other global markets. The big challenge in the US is suburbia, but that’s solvable.

Although I will say 15 minutes is wildly unrealistic.

Alex: When we reported on the ultrafast delivery startups a few years ago, an analyst told me that a 30-minute delivery promise is more reasonable than a 15-minute one.

But Amazon already has fairly fast delivery. Not 30 minutes, obviously, but you can get orders from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods in as little as a few hours.

Also, this is yet another grocery offering for Amazon. It feels like it has too many now. Consider Whole Foods Daily Shop, a small-format grocery store that’s designed for the same kind of fill-in trips that Amazon seems to be targeting with its 30-minute delivery option.

Dominick: When it comes to adding more stores and fulfillment centers, that’s exactly what Amazon needs to be doing, and it needs to get people going to those brick-and-mortar stores and counting on Amazon-exclusive products.

Walmart and Target are proving that having lots of physical locations can get you way closer to making these ultrafast deliveries successful. Walmart has 4,600 stores, Target has 2,000 — that counts for a whole lot.

There are 25,000 Amazon drop boxes, but those obviously can’t contain what’s in a typical Supercenter. Amazon is working on it, though.

Alex: Maybe this is Amazon figuring out how it can compete with Walmart — and Albertsons and Kroger, for that matter — without having the same store footprint. This also puts it in more direct competition with Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart.

Many US consumers live in smaller towns or suburbs. I don’t think 30-minute delivery works well in those areas. People drive themselves to stores — something the retailers love because it’s cheaper for them than making deliveries.

Amazon is not yet in a lot of those areas, like it is in the densest cities in America.

I could see this 30-minute idea working in Manhattan, though people in such densely populated urban areas already have lots of options for a quick grocery run (bodegas, anyone?).

Amazon has been trying for years to boost its market share in grocery. I’m not sure this is it.

Dominick: The last thing I’ll say is I see ultrafast delivery as a key complement to the marketplace strategy that Amazon and Walmart are leaning on.

When customers need something now, that lets the company serve up an ad or some other exposure to the marketplace for a later purchase.

If Amazon and Walmart can get you to check their app first to get that missing ingredient, they could also sell you on some higher-margin product that might take a couple of days to arrive.

Alex: You need toothpaste, onions, and eggs right now, but that Christmas gift you’ve been meaning to buy can come this weekend.

Dominick: That, I think, is the reason it’s going to be these two giants driving this shift: you need to be very big to offer 30-minute delivery in the first place, and then you need to be very big to see any benefit from it as well.


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