Tech giant Google had cut the number of top management roles by 10 percent as part of a long-running campaign to increase efficiency by double that number. The information was shared by Google CEO Sundar Pichai to the company’s employees in an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, reports Business Insider.
The changes were made by the Google over the past couple of years to simplify the company and be more efficient, two people said on the condition of anonymity. A Google spokesperson told the Business Insider that some employees whose positions had been cut would be “transitioned to individual contributor roles”, while some others were “role eliminations”.
In Wednesday’s all-hands meeting, Pichai also clarified the meaning of the word “Googleyness,” telling staff that it needed updating for a modern Google. Googleyness is an amorphic term that has meant many things over the years, but is commonly understood as expressing what Google looks for in potential hires.
Google cut manager, VP roles by 10% in its efficiency push
Sundar Pichai said this had included a 10% reduction in managers, directors, and vice presidents, one source told Business Insider. A Google spokesperson said that some of the roles in that 10% figure were transitioned to individual contributor roles and that some were role eliminations.
The tech giant has been on an efficiency drive for more than two years. In September 2022, Sundar said he wanted Google to be 20% more efficient, and the following January, the company had a historic round of layoffs that saw 12,000 roles eliminated.
This news follows rapid developments in the AI, or Artificial Intelligence, world and at high-flying rivals like OpenAI, which has released products that industry experts have said can threaten Google Search, its online search business that accounted for over 57 per cent of its revenue last year.
Google’s AI features
The efficiency push has coincided with AI rivals such as OpenAI unleashing new products that threaten Google’s search business. Google responded by introducing generative AI features in its products such as a new AI video generator beating OpenAI’s in early testing and a new set of Gemini models, including a “reasoning” model that shows its thought process.
Pichai said the new model would herald “a new agentic era” with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world.
The release sent shares in Google soaring by more than four per cent on Wall Street, a day after the stock already gained 3.5 percent after the release of a breakthrough quantum chip.
Layoffs at Google
The layoffs are also the fourth this year alone, including eliminating “a few hundred” positions from its global advertisements team in January and a 100 more jobs across its cloud unit in June.
Alphabet Inc.-owned Google launched its efficiency drive in September 2022.
By January of the next year, the company had eliminated over 12,000 roles, or 6.4 per cent of its global workforce. In an open letter to employees then, Pichai took “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here”, but said the company had to fuel preceding periods of dramatic growth”.
The eliminations, he said then, followed a “rigorous” and company-wide efficiency audit that included reviewing product areas, functions, levels, and regions across Alphabet.
He also admitted the company could have handled the layoffs better. “This is difficult for any company to go through. At Google, we really haven’t had a moment quite like that in 25 years… (but) it became clear that if we didn’t act, it would have become worse…”
