GM lays off 600 IT workers in deliberate AI skills swap as automaker rebuilds tech workforce

GM just laid off hundreds of IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills | TechCrunch

General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees -- in a deliberate skills swap: clearing out workers whose expertise no longer fits and making room for some with AI-focused backgrounds. GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it had conducted layoffs; they were first reported by Bloomberg News. In an emailed statement, the automaker framed the layoffs as means to prepare it for the future, without providing specifics. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future," the company said. These layoffs are not all permanent headcount reductions. A person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring people for roles in its IT department, but for different skills. The most sought-after capabilities are AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, and agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows. In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up -- designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines -- not just use AI as a productivity tool. GM has laid off white-collar employees in several departments over the past 18 months, as it focuses its resources on high-priority initiatives, including AI. In August 2024, for example, the company cut about 1,000 software workers. The software workforce has undergone significant change since Sterling Anderson -- co-founder of the autonomous trucking startup Aurora and a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry -- was hired in May 2025 as chief product officer. Last November, three top executives left the company's software team as Anderson pushed to consolidate GM's disparate technology businesses into one organization: Baris Cetinok, senior vice president of software and services product management, Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering, and Barak Turovsky, a former VP at Cisco who spent just nine months as GM's chief AI officer. GM has since moved to fill the gap with new AI-focused hires. It hired Behrad Toghi, who previously worked at Apple, in October as AI lead. The company also brought on Rashed Haq as its vice president of autonomous vehicles. Haq spent five years at Cruise -- the self-driving vehicle company acquired and later shuttered by GM -- as its head of AI and robotics. For the industry, GM's restructuring is a signal of what enterprise AI adoption actually looks like in practice -- not just adding AI tools on top of existing teams, but deliberately rebuilding the workforce from the ground up. The specific capabilities it's hiring for -- agent development, model engineering, AI-native workflows -- point directly at where large-enterprise demand is heading.

Laid off GM employees describe ominous meeting, AI and severance

DETROIT -- An ominous email about an oddly timed 15-minute virtual meeting. A scripted message from human resources. And an abrupt end to that meeting, as well as their job. That's how several General Motors employees who were laid off Monday by the Detroit automaker described their jobs being terminated to CNBC. "No appreciation or empathy. No questions. Nothing," said a data analyst who worked for more than a decade at the automaker. The layoffs impacted about 500 to 600 employees, largely in information technology roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, and came as the automaker reevaluates its workforce needs and cuts costs amid uncertain market conditions. Two laid off workers who agreed to speak to CNBC on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions or impacts to potential future jobs said their units had gone through recent restructurings and that they were being encouraged to use artificial intelligence more in their work. "They're going to push AI for everyday work and everything else," said a veteran programmer and data scientist for the company. "I've seen it firsthand. It can make you much more productive, as a programmer. It can really help you get more work done, but AI isn't going to do you any good if you don't know the business." Automakers, like many major companies, are using AI to help workers make their jobs more efficient, but the emerging technology also has led to layoffs. Companies like Amazon, Meta, Oracle and Block have announced rounds of job cuts, with some emphasizing AI's role in automating work and boosting productivity with lower headcounts. GM declined to discuss the role AI played in its most recent layoffs or give additional details of reasoning for the job cuts outside of a Monday statement: "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition." A GM source familiar with the layoffs who requested anonymity to speak about details that had not been made public told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision, as it continues to hire people with such skillsets, but it was not the only reason for the terminations. The data scientist employee said they had been using and learning more about AI for months to try to fulfill what they thought GM wanted out of their team. Despite Monday's cuts, GM is still hiring IT workers. The company as of Tuesday had roughly 80 open IT positions that include jobs working in AI, motorsports and autonomous vehicles, according to the Detroit automaker's careers website. The layoffs impacted employees with a wide array of seniority, according to those involved and with knowledge of the plans. An overview of the GM Severance Program sent to impacted employees and viewed by CNBC offered severance of two months for those who had one to four years of experience. That scales up, and employees with eight years of experience get four months of severance, for example. At the top of the scale, GM is offering six months of severance for employees who had worked at the company for 12 or more years. Lump-sum payments toward health care between $2,000 and $6,000 also will be provided, according to the documents. Any unused vacation or sick time was forfeited unless such actions violated state laws. GM also offered services through mental health care company Lyra "for navigating job loss" and career coaching and future job assistance through outplacement services company LHH. "Experiencing job loss can bring a complex mix of emotions, including stress, sadness, and even confusion. As you navigate this time of change, please know that support is available," one of the documents read. All benefits are pending employees signing a release agreement, according to the documents. They also must, if applicable, return their company vehicles and any equipment.

GM, Ford, and Stellantis have cut 20,000 white-collar jobs. AI is about to accelerate the trend.

Detroit's Big Three cut 19% of white-collar staff since 2022. GM laid off 500 IT workers this week while hiring for 250 AI roles. General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis have together eliminated more than 20,000 US salaried jobs from their recent employment peaks this decade, a 19% reduction of their combined white-collar workforces, according to public filings and employment data analysed by CNBC. The cuts accelerated this week when GM laid off between 500 and 600 IT workers in Texas and Michigan, partially due to changing workforce needs related to artificial intelligence. The numbers tell a story of contraction that predates the current AI moment but is being sharpened by it. Combined white-collar employment across the three automakers peaked at roughly 102,000 jobs in 2022. By the end of last year, it had fallen to 88,700. GM led the reductions, cutting approximately 11,000 salaried positions from a 2022 peak of 58,000, driven by the wind-down and eventual discontinuation of its Cruise robotaxi division, rolling workforce evaluations under CEO Mary Barra, and now AI-related restructuring. Ford scaled back by roughly 5,300 workers from its 2020 peak to approximately 30,700. Stellantis dropped from 15,000 to about 11,000 in the same period. The disconnect between the cuts and the hiring tells you where the industry thinks the value is moving. The three automakers currently have more than 2,000 open US positions, of which nearly 400 involve AI. GM alone is seeking more than 250 AI-related roles. The company is simultaneously eliminating the workers who maintained legacy IT systems and recruiting the people who will build the AI systems that replace them. Ford CEO Jim Farley has been the most explicit about the trajectory. "Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US," Farley said in July at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The statement is more provocative than most CEO prognostications, but it aligns with the direction of his own company's workforce decisions. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a similar point last week, revealing that his company cut support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 after deploying AI agents that now handle half of all customer interactions. The auto industry is arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction: the white-collar workforce built to support internal combustion vehicles, legacy IT infrastructure, and manual business processes is larger than AI-augmented operations require. A veteran programmer and data scientist at GM who was laid off this week told CNBC, anonymously: "They're going to push AI for everyday work and everything else. I've seen it firsthand. It can make you much more productive, as a programmer. It can really help you get more work done, but AI isn't going to do you any good if you don't know the business." The observation captures the tension at the heart of AI-driven workforce restructuring: the technology makes individual workers more productive, but that productivity gain reduces the number of workers required, and the institutional knowledge that departing workers take with them cannot be replicated by a language model. Boston Consulting Group forecasts that 10% to 15% of US jobs could be eliminated as AI proliferates over the next five years, with 50% to 55% of jobs being reshaped within two to three years. Gregory Emerson, managing director at BCG, warned that "those who cut their workforce beyond AI's ability to replace it will see productivity drop, institutional knowledge disappear, and critical talent walk away." The risk is not that automakers adopt AI too aggressively but that they mistake cost reduction for capability building. The broader US auto manufacturing sector has not experienced the same scale of white-collar decline. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows motor vehicle manufacturing jobs dropped only 0.2% from 2022 through last year, to 285,800 workers, a figure that includes both salaried and hourly employees. Toyota reported a roughly 31% increase in its US white-collar workforce from 2020 through 2025, reaching approximately 47,500 people. The Detroit Three's reductions are not an industry-wide pattern but a company-specific one, shaped by their particular exposure to legacy cost structures, EV transition losses, and competitive pressure from Asian and European manufacturers that have been investing in AI-native processes from earlier in the cycle. Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa, who is leading a global turnaround, has said the company still plans to add more than 2,000 white-collar jobs in North America, a counterpoint to the net reduction narrative. Lenny LaRocca, lead of KPMG's automotive practice in the Americas, cautioned that "I don't know necessarily if it's just to reduce headcounts. I think the focus is more on how do they do their job better and how to be more innovative and move quicker." The distinction between using AI to eliminate roles and using AI to transform roles is one that will define whether the Detroit Three emerge from this transition with a leaner, more capable workforce or a hollowed-out one. Chinese automakers are entering Canada with vehicles that cost a fraction of Detroit's products, built by companies that are investing in AI-native manufacturing and software-defined vehicle architectures without the legacy workforce overhead that GM, Ford, and Stellantis are now trying to shed. In the US, Congress is racing to ban Chinese connected vehicles, but the competitive pressure that drives the ban is the same pressure driving the layoffs: Chinese manufacturers can build vehicles more cheaply, in part because they never had 102,000 white-collar workers to begin with. Barra framed the workforce philosophy succinctly at an Automotive Press Association meeting in January: "Sometimes the people who got you to 'point A' aren't necessarily people who are going to get you to 'point B.'" For the 20,000 salaried workers who have already been cut, that distinction is not a management philosophy. It is a termination notice. For the workers who remain, the question is whether they are at point B or simply on the way to it.

GM lays off 600 IT workers in AI skills swap as automaker pivots to software-defined vehicles

General Motors is laying off 500 to 600 salaried IT workers and replacing them with engineers who know how to build AI systems. The cuts, centred in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, represent more than 10 per cent of GM's IT department. The company is not reducing headcount for cost savings. It is executing what amounts to a skills swap: clearing out workers whose expertise no longer fits and hiring data engineers, prompt specialists, and AI-native developers in their place. GM shares fell four per cent after the announcement. The restructuring is narrow. It targets one department in a company that employs roughly 163,000 people. But its significance extends beyond the numbers because it illustrates what enterprise AI adoption looks like in practice at a 118-year-old industrial company. GM is not bolting AI tools onto its existing workforce. It is deliberately rebuilding the workforce from the ground up, role by role, to match the technical demands of a product strategy that has shifted dramatically in the past 18 months. GM bet on three technology futures: electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and software-defined vehicles. It is now retreating from two and doubling down on the third. The electric vehicle pullback has been severe. GM recorded 7.1 billion dollars in special charges in the fourth quarter of 2025, including six billion related to its EV plans. It sold its stake in the Ultium Cells battery plant in Lansing, Michigan, to LG Energy Solution. It idled battery plants in Ohio and Tennessee. It laid off 1,750 workers indefinitely and temporarily cut another 1,670 at EV and battery facilities. In April, GM suspended development of its next-generation full-size electric truck and SUV programme entirely, affecting refreshed versions of the Chevrolet Silverado EV, GMC Sierra EV, GMC Hummer EV, and Cadillac Escalade IQ. The autonomous driving retreat came earlier. In December 2024, GM shut down Cruise's robotaxi operations after years of investment and a series of safety incidents. It absorbed the Cruise technical team into GM's own autonomous vehicle division and redirected the effort toward personal vehicles rather than ride-hailing. Nearly 90 per cent of the code for GM's autonomous driving software is now written by AI, a figure that would have been unthinkable two years ago and that partly explains why the company needs fewer legacy IT workers and more engineers who can manage AI-generated code at scale. The software-defined vehicle strategy is what remains. GM is integrating Google's Gemini conversational AI into its vehicles starting this year. It has contracted with Nvidia to replace the current Qualcomm Snapdragon platform with Nvidia's Drive Thor system, which will debut in 2028 powering an entirely new electrical and electronic architecture designed for software-first vehicles. The company has hired Behrad Toghi from Apple as its AI lead and Rashed Haq, formerly of Cruise, as vice president of autonomous vehicles. The IT layoffs come after a strong first quarter. GM reported 43.6 billion dollars in revenue, roughly flat year over year. Adjusted EBIT was 4.3 billion dollars, up 22 per cent. Adjusted earnings per share were 3.70 dollars, beating Wall Street estimates by 40 per cent. Net income was 2.6 billion dollars. The quarter included a 500 million dollar benefit from a US Supreme Court decision that terminated and refunded certain tariff levies paid under the Trump administration's trade policies. GM raised its full-year 2026 adjusted earnings guidance by 500 million dollars to 13.5 to 15.5 billion, reflecting the tariff rebate. It also booked 1.1 billion dollars in special charges related to the EV pullback, with 90 per cent of expected supplier claims now recorded and most cash outflows expected to conclude this year. The company is profitable, growing earnings, and generating strong cash flow from its North American truck and SUV business, which accounts for the vast majority of its operating income. The IT restructuring is not a distress signal. It is a company that can afford to rebuild its technology workforce choosing to do so while the core business is healthy. Zuckerberg told Meta employees the layoffs are about capital expenditure, not AI productivity, a framing that mirrors GM's approach. Both companies insist the cuts are investments, not austerity. Both are spending the savings on AI infrastructure. Both face the same credibility question: if the cuts are really about building the future, why do the workers being cut learn about it the same way workers learn about cost cuts? Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs while spending 135 billion dollars on AI. The scale differs from GM's 600 IT positions, but the logic is identical. Companies across industries are concluding that their current workforces were assembled for a pre-AI era and that maintaining them is an opportunity cost. The money spent on salaries for workers with legacy skills could be spent on workers with AI skills or on the AI systems themselves. The restructuring is the reallocation. Atlassian launched AI visual tools and partner agents in Confluence one month after cutting 1,600 jobs. The developer tools company followed the same sequence as GM: cut workers, announce AI investment, ship AI features. The pattern has become so consistent across industries that the question is no longer whether companies will restructure around AI but whether the restructurings will produce the outcomes they promise. Chinese courts have ruled that AI replacement is not legal grounds for firing workers, a decision that draws a line the United States has not. In China, an employer cannot terminate an employee solely because AI can perform the job. In the US, GM can lay off 600 IT workers, announce it will hire AI-native replacements, and describe the process as transformation rather than termination. The legal and cultural frameworks for AI-driven workforce restructuring are diverging globally, and GM's approach sits squarely on the American side of that divide. The skills swap model assumes that the workers being hired are available, that they can be integrated into a 118-year-old manufacturing company's culture, and that the AI systems they are building will deliver the productivity gains that justify the disruption. None of these assumptions are guaranteed. The cybersecurity, software engineering, and AI talent markets are among the most competitive in the world. GM is competing for the same workers as Google, Nvidia, Apple, and every other company executing the same pivot. An automaker in Warren, Michigan, is not the obvious first choice for a machine learning engineer choosing between offers. The argument that AI's ability to replace jobs should not be flaunted captures the tension in GM's announcement. The company is not hiding the fact that it is replacing workers with AI-skilled ones. It is presenting it as strategy. The IT layoffs are framed as an upgrade, not a reduction. The language of transformation, optimisation, and skills alignment is designed to distinguish this from a cost cut. But the workers being laid off in Austin and Warren are not being transformed. They are being replaced. The distinction between a cost cut and a skills swap matters to investors and executives. It does not matter to the person who just lost their job because the company decided it needs a different kind of engineer. GM is a profitable company that posted a 40 per cent earnings beat, raised its guidance, and then announced it is firing 600 people because their skills are the wrong skills for a world in which 90 per cent of autonomous driving code is written by AI. The strategy may be correct. The execution may work. The workforce question, what happens to the workers whose skills were right until the company decided they were not, is the one that no restructuring memo answers.

General Motors is laying off IT workers to hire people who specialize in AI

General Motors has confirmed the layoffs and suggested they were part of a broader change to its IT operations. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition." According to a TechCrunch report, General Motors is still hiring IT employees, but only those with the type of skills that would allow them to actually build AI systems rather than simply having the ability to use AI to be more productive. These layoffs are not exactly unprecedented: Over 200 salaried employees at General Motors were laid off in the fall, along with about a thousand cuts to software jobs back in 2024. (A round of sweeping job cuts last year also affected thousands of factory workers.) Each week, yet another company justifies layoffs by citing AI, as tech companies sink endless resources into shoring up their AI investments. Coinbase, Cloudflare, and PayPal all just announced job cuts and at least partly attributed them to AI.

Former Employees of General Motors Point to AI After Recent Layoffs

"They're going to push AI for everyday work and everything else," a veteran programmer and data scientist for the company told CNBC. GM confirmed the layoffs on Monday, leaving nearly 600 salaried IT employees without positions at the company. In response to the layoffs, GM said in statement that the job cut will "better position the company for the future." "As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally," the company added. "We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition."

Axed GM employees claim they were dumped in cold, scripted virtual meetings: 'No appreciation or empathy'

General Motors quietly laid off about 500 to 600 employees this week in a sweeping global shakeup that reportedly blindsided workers with unsettling emails, abrupt virtual meetings and growing fears that artificial intelligence is reshaping the automaker's workforce. Many of the affected employees -- largely IT workers in Michigan, Texas and other locations around the globe -- learned their fate during brief meetings that some workers described as cold and scripted. "No appreciation or empathy. No questions. Nothing," one laid-off employee who spent more than a decade at GM told CNBC. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future," a spokesperson for the Detroit-based auto giant told The Post. "As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition." The cuts came as the Detroit automaker restructures its information technology operations and hunts for workers with more specialized skill sets, including expertise in AI. Workers inside the company said they had spent months being encouraged to use AI tools more heavily in their day-to-day work before the layoffs hit Monday. "They're going to push AI for everyday work and everything else," a veteran programmer and data scientist who lost their job told CNBC. "I've seen it firsthand. It can make you much more productive, as a programmer. It can really help you get more work done, but AI isn't going to do you any good if you don't know the business." Artificial intelligence played a role in the restructuring, though it was not the sole reason behind the cuts. The layoffs were part of a broader global workforce review and were unrelated to return-to-office mandates, according to people familiar with the matter. Not every employee was notified in a brief virtual meeting. Some workers had direct conversations with managers depending on team size and location. Some workers were remote employees, though the cuts stretched across multiple countries. The shakeup underscores anxiety spreading across corporate America as companies embrace artificial intelligence while slashing jobs. Tech giants, including Amazon, Meta, Oracle and Block, have all been announcing layoffs while ramping up investments in AI technology. Even after this week's cuts, GM was still advertising roughly 80 open IT positions Tuesday, including jobs tied to AI, autonomous vehicles and motorsports. The layoffs affected workers across a broad range of seniority levels. According to severance documents reviewed by CNBC, employees with one to four years at GM will receive two months of severance pay, while workers with 12 years or more will receive six months' worth. Affected workers were also offered lump-sum healthcare payments ranging from $2,000 to $6,000, along with mental health services and career-placement assistance. Unused vacation and sick time, however, was forfeited unless protected under state law. Employees were also instructed to return company equipment and, in some cases, company vehicles.