Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has cautioned employees about impending job cuts within the company this year, emphasizing a strategic shift towards investments in artificial intelligence and other key areas.
In a communication titled “2024 priorities and the year ahead,” distributed to employees on Wednesday evening, Pichai outlined the company’s ambitious objectives for the year. He mentioned that Google’s leadership is preparing to unveil its AI targets for the year and will release its 2024 OKRs (objectives and key results) shortly.
Pichai acknowledged the necessity of making difficult decisions to facilitate these investments, including streamlining operations by removing certain roles and organizational layers to enhance efficiency and speed.
The Verge initially reported on the memo, with no immediate response from a Google spokesperson.
This latest directive from Pichai indicates a sustained focus on cost reduction at Google, following previous rounds of layoffs that commenced in January 2023, resulting in the elimination of 12,000 jobs, approximately 6% of the full-time workforce. The company also scaled back on various benefits, including laptops and equipment.
In the wake of these measures, Google has further downsized its workforce by several hundred employees across departments such as central engineering, hardware, and advertising.
Pichai clarified in the recent memo that some teams will continue to make decisions regarding resource allocation. However, he assured that the scale of the upcoming layoffs will not mirror those of the previous year and will not impact every team within the organization.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, witnessed a 55% surge in shares last year amid a broader tech stock rally following a challenging 2022, driven partly by the growing enthusiasm surrounding AI. The third quarter of the year saw a return to double-digit revenue growth for Google, coinciding with a resurgence in the digital advertising market.
Recently, Google introduced Gemini, its most extensive and advanced AI model to date. Initial tests have shown that Gemini’s performance has marginally surpassed that of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, the developer of ChatGPT.
