Google has also committed money to the development of Anthropic AI, and its CEO, Sindar Pichai, warned continuous cuts throughout 2024, which started in January. This is despite Google reporting powerful growth. “We are investing responsibly in our company’s greatest priorities and significant future opportunities,” says Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesman. In 2023 and 2024, several Google teams “made changes to be more efficient and work better,” Tomson says. “By doing so, we are simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunities to work on our most innovative and important advances and the company’s most important priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”
This narrative of the shift to AI mirrors previous moves by tech companies, such as outsourcing workers, that have led to: bad working conditions for some contract workers in other countries. “There doesn’t seem to be a real connection between investments in AI and the trade-offs that have to be made in other parts of the workforce, but it’s actually a narrative shift being used to capture the change that precedes the shift to AI,” says Parul Koul, president of the union Employees of Alphabet-CWA, which represents some of the employees of companies affected by recent layoffs. But because workers aren’t given enough transparency about whether their layoffs are tied to AI, it’s still arduous to tie some layoffs directly to the technology, Koul says.
The next step, of course, would be to recognize that the artificial intelligence these companies are investing in is further disrupting their own workplaces. But for now it doesn’t look like that will happen. Artificial intelligence-related layoffs make up a diminutive portion of layoffs across industries. More than 5,000 job cuts were made between May 2023 and April 2024, with companies citing AI as the reason, but this was either because companies focused on developing AI technology or used AI tools to take over tasks and roles – the study shows report from the outplacement services company Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
According to estimates, in the world of technology alone there will be almost 100,000 layoffs in 2024. Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks layoffs in the tech industry. Still, some types of jobs are starting to return to normal. According to CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the U.S. IT industry, job vacancies for artificial intelligence, or those that require artificial intelligence skills, accounted for 12 percent of all tech job openings in May — the highest percentage in six years. But AI doesn’t exist in a silo, says Tim Herbert, research director at CompTIA, and its adoption will likely create the additional jobs needed to support the up-to-date technology. “Artificial intelligence will likely spur investment in other areas,” he says.
The AI shakeup may not be a huge AI takeover, but if AI is to be the next massive opportunity for companies like Alphabet, the lack of efforts to upskill and train employees to work in these departments is concerning, Koul says. “There are ways in which the existing workforce can be kept together or treated with dignity and respect in this process,” says Koul. “Many of my colleagues, many members of our union, work here because they are driven by the mission and believe in the usefulness of the products they work on. More opportunities to retrain and transfer people to other departments would be very welcome.”