By Wired
Published on January 18, 2024
Google has laid off more than a thousand people since January 10 — and according to CEO Sundar Pichai, there will be more firings in the future as the company pushes forward with its AI pivot.
“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told Google’s staff in a company-wide email reviewed by The Verge. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”
Those layoffs, as prior reporting from Business Insider and Axios indicates, took place across several departments. Hundreds were in the company’s advertising and customer sales teams, while others impacted the Google Assistant, Fitbit, and hardware verticals.
In the more recent memo, the CEO said that although the more recent and forthcoming “role eliminations” will not be “at the scale of last year’s reductions” — a reference to the 12,000 jobs Google cut around this time last year — the company will continue down the path of “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.”