In Sundar Pichai’s memo, he acknowledges that the upcoming job cuts will be in addition to the layoffs reported last week.
The CEO of Google has informed employees to anticipate further job cuts later this year following a recent round of layoffs impacting 1,000 staff.
In a memo to the staff on Wednesday, Sundar Pichai stated that “some roles may be impacted” as various divisions within the tech company continue to undergo changes. Pichai’s memo recognized an additional round of job cuts reported last week, affecting 1,000 workers, as noted by the Alphabet Workers Union, representing employees of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
“We have ambitious objectives and will be allocating resources to our major priorities,” he stated in the memo reported by The Verge. “The truth is, in order to generate the capacity for this investment, we need to make difficult decisions.”
Pichai mentioned that the challenging decisions made thus far have involved job reductions in various Google divisions, including search, advertising sales, and the YouTube platform. Google places significant strategic emphasis on artificial intelligence, introducing its counterpart to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, named Bard, and a new AI model called Gemini last year.
Regarding the 12,000 redundancies across Alphabet in January of the previous year, he indicated that the current role eliminations would not reach that magnitude. As of September 30 last year, the company had a workforce of 182,000 people, as per its most recent quarterly results.
Pichai conveyed, “These reductions in roles are not on the scale of last year’s cutbacks and will not affect every team. But I understand that witnessing colleagues and teams being impacted is very challenging.”
When announcing the job cuts last year, Pichai acknowledged that Alphabet had engaged in a significant hiring spree amid the heightened demand for tech services during the Covid-19 pandemic. Admitting to overexpansion, he noted that Alphabet had “hired for a different economic reality” than the one currently faced.
Pichai’s memo on Wednesday reached employees amidst ongoing tech layoffs, although not reaching the scale observed a year ago when Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, and Meta collectively implemented tens of thousands of job cuts while adapting to a post-lockdown economic landscape. In December, Spotify announced a 17% reduction in its global workforce, and Amazon initiated layoffs in its Prime Video and studios units, along with around 500 employees at its live-streaming platform, Twitch.
As per a website tracking tech industry job losses, layoffs.fyi, there have been 7,785 global redundancies in the tech sector so far this year. In comparison, during the same period last year, tech firms had laid off a much larger number of workers, totaling around 38,000 staff.
Pichai noted on Wednesday that the recent job cuts were focused on “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas,” and he mentioned that further role eliminations would occur.
Many of these changes have already been announced. To be transparent, it’s important to note that some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year as needed, and certain roles may be impacted,” he added.
Christopher Gilchrist, a principal analyst at the research firm Forrester, mentioned that during periods of technological transformation, such as the rise of generative AI, companies like Google have acknowledged that “the needle has moved” and they must adapt to remain competitive.
