New Delhi:
Google has laid off 10 percent of its management staff as part of a long-running campaign to increase efficiency by double that number. According to multiple news reports, CEO Sundar Pichai indicated in an all-hands meeting on Wednesday that the cuts will take place in the positions of manager, director and vice president.
A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that some employees whose positions were eliminated would be “moved into individual contributor roles” while others would be “role eliminations.”
This news follows rapid developments in the world of AI, or artificial intelligence, and among high-flying rivals like OpenAI, which has released products that industry experts have said could threaten Google Search, the online search business that accounted for more than 57 percent of its sales. turnover last year.
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Google responded by introducing generative AI features into its products and this month by launching Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model yet. Mr Pichai said the new model would usher in “a new age of agents” with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world.
The release caused shares in Google to rise by more than four percent on Wall Street, a day after the stock already gained 3.5 percent following the release of a groundbreaking quantum chip.
The layoffs are also the fourth this year alone, including the elimination of “a few hundred” positions across its global advertising team in January and another 100 jobs across its cloud division in June.
Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., launched its efficiency drive in September 2022.
By January of the following year, the company had eliminated more than 12,000 positions, or 6.4 percent of its global workforce. In an open letter to employees, Pichai then “took full responsibility for the decisions that led us here” but said the company had to fuel previous periods of dramatic growth.”
The eliminations, he said at the time, followed a “rigorous” and company-wide efficiency audit, which included assessing product areas, functions, levels and regions within Alphabet.
He also admitted that the company could have handled the layoffs better.
READ | “If we did nothing…”: Sundar Pichai on why Google laid off 12,000 people
“This is difficult for any company to experience. At Google, we have never experienced a moment like this in 25 years… (but) it became clear that if we had done nothing, things would have gotten even worse.” …”
Meanwhile, at the same meeting, Mr Pichai also spoke of a transformation of corporate culture and the need to redefine its “Googley-ness” – an amorphous term that has meant many things over the years but is widely understood to express of what Google is looking for. for potential hires.
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