American Express Cuts 3,500 Jobs Despite Profit Jump

The American Express job cuts announced on Friday will eliminate about 3,500 positions, or roughly 5% of the company’s global workforce, even as the card giant reported sharply higher profits and raised its full-year earnings forecast.

Chief Executive Stephen Squeri disclosed the plan on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, saying the restructuring is designed to make the organization leaner and better prepared for automation and artificial intelligence. The company booked a $336 million pretax restructuring charge in the quarter to cover the move.

The announcement adds American Express to a growing list of major employers cutting staff this week, including Barclays, eBay and Volvo Cars, in a wave of layoffs that has unsettled workers even at profitable companies.

Strong results, smaller workforce

American Express reported third-quarter revenue of $20.1 billion, up 9% from a year earlier, according to its earnings release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 23. Net income rose 28% to $3.7 billion, or $5.42 a share, and billed business reached $454 billion, up 8%.

The company also raised its full-year 2026 earnings guidance to $18.30 to $18.60 a share, or $17.60 to $17.90 on an adjusted basis. Much of the profit growth came from the company’s premium card business: net card fees rose by more than $400 million from a year earlier after American Express moved the vast majority of its members to a new, higher-fee Platinum Card.

Last year, the company updated the Platinum Card, adding new perks while raising the annual fee from $695 to $895. According to the Associated Press, nearly all customers moved to the higher fee have decided to keep the card, and the average cardmember spent $6,735 on their cards last quarter, up 5% from a year earlier.

That combination — rising profits and job cuts announced in the same breath — is what made Friday’s news striking. It is the company’s first major round of layoffs in roughly a decade, according to the AP.

Why American Express is cutting jobs

Squeri and Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec framed the cuts as structural rather than cyclical. The goal, they said, is to reduce management layers, broaden spans of control and simplify the organization before expanding automation.

“You don’t want to automate processes that are not optimally structured,” Le Caillec told CNBC. He described the objective as becoming “leaner, more agile, and also to prepare for AI,” adding that the company expects to take advantage of artificial intelligence over the coming quarters and years.

The company has not said that AI is replacing the eliminated roles, and it has not attributed the cuts to any specific software it has deployed. The stated logic is readiness: flatten the organization first, then let automation absorb work as it becomes available.

Cost pressure is also part of the story. Operating costs rose about 9% to $14.5 billion in the third quarter, according to reporting on the results, and competition in the premium card market is expensive. Capital One and JPMorgan Chase have expanded rewards and benefits packages that put pressure on American Express to keep spending to retain high-value customers.

A week of layoffs across corporate America

American Express is not cutting alone. The week brought a string of workforce reductions at major employers:

• eBay said Wednesday it would cut about 9% of its staff, roughly 1,000 workers
• Barclays announced 5,000 job cuts on Thursday to reduce costs and embrace AI
• Volvo Cars said Friday it would cut another 2,500 jobs
• Electronic Arts announced 400 job cuts and studio shutdowns earlier in the week

The pattern is notable: several of these companies are profitable, and several cited efficiency and AI readiness rather than falling demand. That has fueled a debate about whether corporate America is using AI as a rationale for workforce reductions that would have happened anyway, or whether automation is genuinely reshaping how many people large companies need.

American Express shares fell more than 3% on Friday, CNBC reported, and were down about 12% for the year before the announcement, according to Reuters.

What is still unknown

The company has not specified which countries, departments or offices will bear the reductions, or on what timeline individual employees will be affected. With roughly 78,000 employees worldwide, according to a figure Squeri gave Bloomberg Television, the 5% cut translates to about 3,500 jobs — but how that total is distributed remains unclear.

That uncertainty is often the hardest part of a layoff announcement for workers. A global number tells employees that cuts are coming without telling any individual whether their role is affected. The company has also not said how many of the eliminated roles it expects AI to absorb over time.

Analysts will be watching the next quarterly results for signs of how the restructuring affects service quality and operating costs. American Express sells itself on premium customer service, and any visible decline in support could undermine the value proposition behind its $895 Platinum Card fee.

The bigger picture for workers

The American Express announcement captures a shift in how large companies talk about layoffs. In past downturns, job cuts were framed as a response to falling revenue. Now, they are increasingly framed as preparation — for AI, for automation, for a leaner future — even when revenue is rising.

For workers, that framing offers little comfort. A job lost to “efficiency” is still a job lost, and the promise that automation will create new roles elsewhere is difficult to verify in advance. For investors, however, the message is clearer: management is willing to cut costs aggressively even in good times.

Whether that trade-off pays off for American Express will depend on execution. If the company can automate routine work without damaging the customer experience that justifies its premium fees, the restructuring will look prescient. If service slips, or if the cuts prove to have been too deep, the savings may come at a cost that does not show up in a quarterly earnings release.