Tech giant Google has announced that the company is set to lay off hundreds of employees in several of its divisions as the Alphabet Inc.-owned company sustains a drive to cut costs.
In a statement, the company revealed that the layoffs are part of a re-organization affecting its Devices & Services teams.
“A few hundred roles are being eliminated in Devices & Services with the majority of impacts on the 1P AR Hardware team.
While we are making changes to our 1P AR hardware team, Google continues to be deeply committed to other AR initiatives,” read part of the statement.
The company further revealed that the layoffs will affect staff working on its digital assistant, and engineering teams.
These include workers working on the augmented reality hardware team and the voice-based Google Assistant.
Google firing to affect hundreds
Also, the company announced that employees working in its central engineering organization will also get hit by the cuts.
It is important to note that hardware’s such as Pixel, Fitbit and Nest are handled by the Devices & Services teams.
In the new re-organization, the tech giant is seeking to switch to a common functional organization model.
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The new mode further aims at having one team responsible for roles such as hardware engineering across all its hardware divisions.
Previously, the Fitbit, Nest and Pixel divisions contained independent and distinct teams handling aspects such as hardware engineering.
According to 9to5google, the reorganization also saw Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman leave the company.
Artificial Intelligence
Furthermore, the transformation also came as the company aims at shifting towards artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising.
Currently, Google’s core search business is facing stiff competition from rival AI-offerings giants OpenAI and Microsoft Corp.
Both the companies are pushing their AI services, like Co-Pilot and ChatGPT, which is in turn impacting Google’s main search business.
As a result, Google’s senior executives are reviewing the business and pledging to scrutinize operations.
This is in an aim to find areas where they can reduce costs, make cuts and allocate more funds to their most important goals.
“Throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement.
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2023 redundancies
In January 2023, the tech giant announced a mass layoff that would affect almost 6% of its global workforce turned out to be the biggest ever layoff in the history of the company.
However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that laying off 12,000 employees from the firm was a tough but necessary decision for the growth of the company.
Terming the decision as “difficult but necessary”, Pichai said that if the company hadn’t cut those jobs last year, it would have been “a worse decision down the line.”
“It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas,” said Pichai.
