Amrutha Avasarala, Pune
The tech giant, Google has announced a layoff of 1,000 employees from its advertising sales team.
Google’s Senior Vice President, Philipp Schindler, mentioned that the lay off was done in the Large Customer Sales (LCS) department. This department handles large business clients for advertisements. The Google Customer Solutions (GCS) team, which deals with ads for small businesses, would not be the “core” team responsible for ads and sales.
Earlier this week, the company stated that it would carry out a massive layoff drive in several units of voice assistance, Pixel’s hardware team, Nest and Fitbit and its augmented reality team. The layoffs are planned to manage expenses of the company worldwide.
The giant also expects several layoffs in 2024 reasoning that companies are now looking for AI alternatives and automation to reduce loads of work. According to a report by The Information, Google is expected to layoff 30,000 of its employees. The intention is to shift from human workforce to AI based algorithms to manage resources.
Chris Pappas, a spokesperson for Google, told The Verge that the company reviews the ads team each year and it’s a practice to regularly restructure the team. “We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. As part of this, a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles or elsewhere at Google,” he said.
In January 2023, Alphabet laid off 12,000 jobs. This was a major step as it accounted for 6% of its global workforce. Not just Google, but also other big companies such as Amazon have expressed their intentions to manage their workforce to reduce expenses.
The main reason for layoffs all over, could be accredited to the economic slowdown in the US and the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI and ML are carrying out the tasks which could potentially replace human capabilities and is a threat to jobs and employment.