Google has laid off 10 per cent of its managerial staff as part of a long-running campaign to increase efficiency by double that number. Multiple news reports said CEO Sundar Pichai, in an all-hands meeting Wednesday, indicated the cuts will come at the manager, director, and vice president roles.
A Google spokesperson told the Business Insider that some employees whose positions had been cut would be “transitioned to individual contributor roles”, while some others were “role eliminations”.
This news follows rapid developments in the AI, or Artificial Intelligence, world and at high-flying rivals like OpenAI, which has released products that industry experts have said can threaten Google Search, its online search business that accounted for over 57 per cent of its revenue last year.
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Google responded by introducing generative AI features in its products and the launch this month of Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model to date. Mr Pichai said the new model would herald “a new agentic era” with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world.
The release sent shares in Google soaring by more than four per cent on Wall Street, a day after the stock already gained 3.5 percent after the release of a breakthrough quantum chip.
The layoffs are also the fourth this year alone, including eliminating “a few hundred” positions from its global advertisements team in January and a 100 more jobs across its cloud unit in June.
Alphabet Inc.-owned Google launched its efficiency drive in September 2022.
By January of the next year, the company had eliminated over 12,000 roles, or 6.4 per cent of its global workforce. In an open letter to employees then, Mr Pichai took “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here”, but said the company had to fuel preceding periods of dramatic growth”.
The eliminations, he said then, followed a “rigorous” and company-wide efficiency audit that included reviewing product areas, functions, levels, and regions across Alphabet.
He also admitted the company could have handled the layoffs better.
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“This is difficult for any company to go through. At Google, we really haven’t had a moment quite like that in 25 years… (but) it became clear that if we didn’t act, it would have become worse…”
Meanwhile, in the same meeting, Mr Pichai also spoke about a transformation of the corporate culture and the need to redefine its “Googleyness” – an amorphic term that has meant many things over the years, but is commonly understood as expressing what Google looks for in potential hires.
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