ReportWire

Tag: Layoffs

  • Can you save tax by putting severance into a corporation? – MoneySense

    How is a lump-sum severance taxed?

    When you lose your job and receive severance, it may be paid as a lump sum payment. It is generally a certain number of weeks of salary that increases based on factors like length of service, age, and seniority. Other factors can play a role, though. 

    When you receive a lump sum payment, the withholding tax is generally only 30%. The problem is that regardless of the withholding tax on a lump sum severance payment or any other source of income, when you file your tax return, the appropriate tax rate is determined. 

    If you receive a large severance, or have a high income to begin with, the tax owing on the payment could be an additional 20% or more.

    Related reading: How to avoid tax on severance pay

    How is salary continuance taxed?

    When you lose your job, you may continue to be paid your regular salary for a certain period of time. This is called salary continuance. 

    The payroll withholding tax is the same as if you continued to be paid a salary. The result is that your tax withholding should be more or less in line with what your tax owing will be on your tax return, barring other income sources, tax deductions, or tax credits. 

    How does a corporation save tax?

    Corporations can help defer and save tax, Geoffrey, but it depends on the circumstances. The best tax use case for a corporation is to earn active business income. If you run a business and earn profit through a corporation that you leave in the corporation and do not withdraw, it can be subject to a low rate of tax. 

    Article Continues Below Advertisement


    Depending on the province or territory, it can be as low as 9 to 12%. There is more tax payable when you withdraw the money and use it personally, but a corporation is definitely a great tax deferral tool.

    Income Tax Guide for Canadians

    Deadlines, tax tips and more

    The problem with the severance is that it is employment income. If you have it paid into a corporation or you transfer the payment into a corporation, that does not magically turn T4 employment income into corporate active business income. As a result, a corporation will not help you save tax on a severance. 

    Does putting money into a corporation to invest save tax? 

    The tax rate on investment income earned in a corporation is similar to the top tax rate in most provinces and territories. As a result, earning investment income in a corporation tends to result in comparable or even more tax than earning it personally, Geoffrey.

    So, why do people use investment holding companies? The reason is the aforementioned small business tax rate of 9 to 12%. If you earn business income and can leave it in a corporation to invest, you may be able to invest roughly 90 cents on the dollar of your corporate profit. 

    Business owners often do so using a separate investment holding company, where they can transfer money out of their active business. However, putting personal savings into a corporation to invest will not generally save you tax. 

    How can you save tax on a severance?

    If you want to save tax on a severance, there are two easy ways, Geoffrey.

    The first is to contribute to your registered retirement savings plan (RRSP). You may even have the opportunity to have your employer transfer some or all of your severance directly into your RRSP with no withholding tax. But remember, this is like getting your tax refund up front. You will not also get a tax refund when you file your tax return. 

    The second opportunity is to defer the severance to a future year. Especially if it is later in the calendar year, your employer may be open to deferring the payment to January to push the incremental tax back one year. Some employers will pay a severance over multiple years, but this is less common. 

    Jason Heath, CFP

    Source link

  • Jeppesen ForeFlight in Arapahoe County cutting a large number of workers

    Jeppesen ForeFlight, based in Arapahoe County, laid off a large number of employees on Wednesday, raising concerns among some airline pilots who rely heavily on the company’s products, according to industry and employee reports.

    The company has declined to provide the number of jobs being eliminated, and it hasn’t filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which is required when a company eliminates 50 or more jobs at a single work site.

    Citing anonymous employee reports, one industry publication, AeroTime, estimated the cuts were around 30%, which would translate to more than 540 workers from an estimated headcount of more than 1,800 employees.

    Employees commenting on Reddit put the layoffs at closer to 40% to 50% of the headcount, according to Aviation International News.

    “I was laid off via email, after 20 years with the company … classy place,” said one former employee on Reddit.

    The company disputed those figures while declining to provide a precise number.

    “Jeppesen ForeFlight made changes to streamline our operating model, which will support continued investment in product innovation and customer experience. While we are not sharing specific numbers, the current percentages being relayed through media are misleading and overstated,” the company said in a statement.

    The company said it was supporting all affected employees with severance, benefits and resources through the transition and that “safe, reliability and our customer commitments remain unchanged and remain our top priority.”

    JeppesenForeFlight is the leading provider of navigation and other software to the airline industry. Some pilots expressed concerns about the ongoing reliability and future quality of the company’s popular products, while others were taking a wait-and-see attitude, according to AeroTimes.

    Last fall, the private equity firm Thoma Bravo paid $10.55 billion in cash for Boeing’s Digital Aviation Solutions, which included ForeFlight, Jeppesen, AerData and Oz Runways.

    On Nov. 3, Thoma Bravo announced it had combined Jeppesen and ForeFlight into a new company called Jeppesen ForeFlight. Shortly after, the company’s CEO Brad Surek raised eyebrows when he told AvBrief.com that AI would be the company’s “north star” as it created a roadmap for future offerings.

    Thoma Bravo describes itself as one of the largest software-focused investors in the world, with over $181 billion in assets under management as of June 30.

    The firm has generated strong returns for its investors, but is also known for aggressive cost-cutting and large and undisclosed layoffs. Among the euphemisms it has used in the past are “strategic organizational changes” and “staffing optimization effort.”

    In 1934, airline pilot Elrey Borge Jeppesen founded a company to provide the first standardized aviation navigation charts, which proved a hit with other pilots.

    The company moved its headquarters from Salt Lake City to Denver in the 1940s. In the 1960s, it set up shop at 55 Inverness Drive East, where it has remained.

    Aldo Svaldi

    Source link

  • Meta Reportedly Cutting About 1,500 VR and AR Jobs Amid Renewed Push to Become an AI Juggernaut

    According to an anonymously-sourced New York Times article, as early as Tuesday Meta will announce that about 10% of the workers in the company’s Reality Labs division are set to lose their jobs—about 1,500 people in a division of about 15,000.

    Reality Labs was once Oculus, the VR headset company founded by Palmer Luckey, originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Since being acquired in 2014 by what was at the time called Facebook, Oculus has evolved into the “virtual and augmented reality”-focused division of Meta. It makes headsets and the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses along with VR and AR software, including the Horizon Worlds social networking platform—what’s left of it, anyway.

    The Times says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has called for a meeting of Reality Labs staff members on Wednesday that he has deemed the “most important” meeting of the year, and indicated that employees are meant to attend in person. From the sound of it, this meeting will be held the day after the layoff plan is officially made public.

    My Gizmodo colleague James Pero strongly implied last month that something like this was coming, noting that a planned 30% budget cut at Reality Labs was, if not the death knell for the metaverse project at Meta, then a least a clear shift in priorities to AI.

    And indeed, on Monday Meta announced a massive buildout plan for data center capacity called Meta Compute, aimed at building “tens of gigawatts” of AI compute before the end of the 2020s. Compute buildout is somewhat crudely measured in gigawatts—roughly the power usage of a major U.S. city. So Meta’s rather vague “tens of gigawatts” of compute projection translates to “enough data centers to use more than ten San Franciscos’ worth of electricity, but less than one hundred San Franciscos.”

    Also on Monday, Meta announced something sure to help smooth over the friction involved in all this AI data center construction: the hiring of Dina Powell McCormick—a former advisor to Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who has also worked as a banking executive—to be Meta’s new president and vice chairperson.

    “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement.

    Zuckerberg also used the term “strategic advantage” in 2022 to explain his push for more metaverse-related technology. “Enabling more experiences is really the primary driver and then the sort of fortification against external risks is certainly a strategic advantage over the long-term,” he said at the time.

    Mike Pearl

    Source link

  • This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again | Fortune

    Eric Vaughan, CEO of enterprise-software powerhouse IgniteTech, was unwavering as he reflected on the most radical decision of his decades-long career. In early 2023, convinced generative AI was an “existential” transformation, Vaughan looked at his team and saw a workforce not fully on board. His ultimate response: He ripped the company down to the studs, replacing nearly 80% of staff within a year, according to headcount figures reviewed by Fortune.

    Over the course of 2023 and into the first quarter of 2024, Vaughan told Fortune, IgniteTech replaced hundreds of employees, declining to disclose a specific number. “That was not our goal,” he told Fortune. “It was extremely difficult … But changing minds was harder than adding skills.” It was, by any measure, a brutal reckoning—but Vaughan insists it was necessary, and said he’d do it again.

    For Vaughan, the writing on the wall was clear and dramatic.

    “In early 2023, we saw the light,” he told Fortune in an August 2025 interview, adding he believed every tech company was facing a crucial inflection point around adoption of artificial intelligence. “Now I’ve certainly morphed to believe that this is every company, and I mean that literally every company, is facing an existential threat by this transformation.”

    Where others saw promise, Vaughan saw urgency—believing failing to get ahead on AI could doom even the most robust business. He called an all-hands meeting with his global remote team. Gone were the comfortable routines and quarterly goals. Instead, his message was direct: Everything would now revolve around AI. “We’re going to give a gift to each of you. And that gift is tremendous investment of time, tools, education, projects … to give you a new skill,” he explained. The company began reimbursing for AI tools and prompt-engineering classes, and even brought in outside experts to evangelize.

    “Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”

    This was a major investment, he added: 20% of payroll was dedicated to a mass-learning initiative, and it failed because of mass resistance, even sabotage. Belief, Vaughan discovered, is a hard thing to manufacture.

    “In those early days, we did get resistance, we got flat-out, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do this’ resistance,” he said. “And so we said goodbye to those people.”

    The pushback: white collar resistance

    Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.

    This friction is borne out by broader research. According to the 2025 enterprise AI adoption report by Writer, an agentic AI platform for enterprises, one in three workers say they’ve “actively sabotaged” their company’s AI rollout—a number that jumps to 41% of millennial and Gen Z employees. This can take the form of refusing to use AI tools, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, or avoiding training altogether. Many act out because of fears that AI will replace their jobs, while others are frustrated by lackluster AI tools or unclear strategy from leadership.

    Writer’s chief strategy officer Kevin Chung told Fortune the “big eye-opening thing” from this survey was the human element of AI resistance.

    “This sabotage isn’t because they’re afraid of the technology,” he said. “It’s more like there’s so much pressure to get it right, and then when you’re handed something that doesn’t work, you get frustrated.”

    He added Writer’s research shows workers often don’t trust where their organizations are headed.

    “When you’re handed something that isn’t quite what you want, it’s very frustrating, so the sabotage kicks in, because then people are like, ‘Okay, I’m going to run my own thing. I’m going to go figure it out myself.’” You definitely don’t want this kind of “shadow IT” in an organization, he added.

    Vaughan said he didn’t want to force anyone.

    “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe,” he said, adding belief was really the thing he needed to recruit for.

    Company leadership ultimately realized they’d have to launch a massive recruiting effort for what became known as “AI innovation specialists.” This applied across the board: to sales, finance, marketing, and elsewhere. Vaughan said this time was “really difficult” as things inside the company were “upside down … We didn’t really quite know where we were or who we were yet.”

    A couple of key hires helped, starting with the person who became IgniteTech’s chief AI officer, Thibault Bridel-Bertomeu. That led to a full reorganization of the company that Vaughan called “somewhat unusual.” Essentially, every division came to report into the AI organization, regardless of domain.

    This centralization, Vaughan said, prevented duplication of efforts and maximized knowledge sharing—a common struggle in AI adoption, where Writer’s survey shows 71% of the C-suite at other companies say AI applications are being created in silos and nearly half report their employees have been left to “figure generative AI out on their own.”

    No pain, no gain?

    In exchange for this difficult transformation, IgniteTech reaped extraordinary results. By the end of 2024, the company had launched two patent-pending AI solutions, including a platform for AI-based email automation (Eloquens AI), with a radically rebuilt team.

    Financially, IgniteTech remained strong. Vaughan disclosed the company, which he said was in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.

    “You multiply people … give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime. In the months since, Vaughan told Fortune in an early 2026 statement, the company has only kept growing its headcount, recruiting globally for AI Innovation Specialists across every function, from marketing to sales to finance to engineering to support.

    What does Vaughan’s story say for others? On one level, it’s a case study in the pain and payoff of radical change management. But his ruthless approach arguably addresses many challenges identified in the Writer survey: lack of strategy and investment, misalignment between IT and business, and the failure to engage champions who can unlock AI’s benefits.

    The ‘boy who cried wolf’ problem

    To be sure, IgniteTech is far from alone in wrestling with these challenges. Joshua Wöhle is the CEO of Mindstone, a firm that provides AI upskilling services to workforces, training hundreds of employees monthly at companies including Lufthansa, Hyatt, and NBA teams. He recently discussed the two approaches described by Vaughan—upskilling and mass replacement—in an appearance on BBC Business Today.

    Wöhle contrasted the recent examples of Ikea and Klarna, arguing the former’s example shows why it’s better to “reskill” existing employees. Klarna, a Swedish buy-now, pay-later firm, drew considerable publicity for a decision to reduce members of its customer support staff in a pivot to AI, only to rehire for the same roles.

    “We’re near the point where [AI is] more intelligent than most people doing knowledge work. But that’s precisely why augmentation beats automation,” Wöhle wrote on LinkedIn.

    A representative for Klarna told Fortune the company did not lay off employees, but has instead adopted several approaches to its customer service, which is managed by outsourced customer service providers who are paid according to the volume of work required. The launch of an AI customer service assistant reduced the workload by the equivalent of 700 full-time agents—from roughly 3,000 to 2,300—and the third-party providers redeployed those 700 workers to other clients, according to Klarna. Now that the AI customer service agent is “handling more complex queries than when we launched,” Klarna says, that number has fallen to 2,200. Klarna says its contractor has rehired just two people in a pilot program designed to combine highly trained human support staff with AI to deliver outstanding customer service. 

    In an interview with Fortune, Wöhle said one client of his has been very blunt with his workers, ordering them to dedicate all Fridays to AI retraining, and if they didn’t report back on any of their work, they were invited to leave the company.

    He said it can be “kinder” to dismiss workers who are resistant to AI: “The pace of change is so fast that it’s the kinder thing to force people through it.” He added he used to think if he got all workers to really love learning, then that could help Mindstone make a real difference, but he discovered after training literally thousands of people that “most people hate learning. They’d avoid it if they can.”

    Wöhle attributed much of the AI resistance in the workforce to a “boy who cried wolf” problem from the tech sector, citing NFTs and blockchain as technologies that were billed as revolutionary but “didn’t have the real effect” that tech leaders promised.

    “You can’t really blame them” for resisting, he said. Most people “get stuck because they think from their work flow first,” he added, and they conclude AI is overhyped because they want AI to fit into their old way of working. “It takes a lot more thinking and a lot more kind of prodding for you to change the way that you work,” but once you do, you see dramatic increases. A human can’t possibly keep five call transcripts in their head while you’re trying to write a proposal to a client, he offers, but AI can.

    Ikea echoed Wöhle when reached for comment, saying its “people-first AI approach focuses on augmentation, not automation.” A spokesperson said Ikea is using AI to automate tasks, not jobs, freeing up time for value-added, human-centric work.

    The Writer report notes companies with formal AI strategies are far more likely to succeed, and those who heavily invest in AI outperform their peers by a large margin. But as Vaughan’s experience shows, investment without belief and buy-in can be wasted energy. “The culture needed to be built. Ultimately, we ended up having to go out and recruit and hire people that were already of the same mind. Changing minds was harder than adding skills.”

    From the vantage point of early 2026, Vaughan reflected in a statement to Fortune, monthly all-hands meetings look nothing like they used to: “We killed the format of reviewing goals and metrics. Now teams demo what they built.” He wanted to stress something else: Despite the drastic actions he took to restructure, he still doesn’t think he’s ahead of the curve.

    “We’re just not getting run over from behind yet,” he said. “The pace of change in AI is relentless. If we don’t keep pushing, keep learning every single day, we’re toast.”

    For Vaughan, there’s no ambiguity. Would he do it again? He doesn’t hesitate: He’d rather endure months of pain and build a new, AI-driven foundation from scratch than let an organization drift into irrelevance.

    “This is not a tech change. It is a cultural change, and it is a business change,” he said, adding he doesn’t recommend others follow his lead and swap out 80% of their staff.

    “I do not recommend that at all,” he said. “That was not our goal. It was extremely difficult.”

    But at the end of the day, he added, everybody’s got to be in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. Otherwise, “we don’t get where we’re going.”

    A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on August 17, 2025.

    More on AI in the workplace:

    Nick Lichtenberg

    Source link

  • Investors predict AI is coming for labor in 2026  | TechCrunch

    Concerns about how AI will affect workers continue to rise in lockstep with the pace of advancements and new products promising automation and efficiency.

    Evidence suggests that fear is warranted.

    A November MIT study found an estimated 11.7% of jobs could already be automated using AI. Surveys have shown employers are already eliminating entry-level jobs because of the technology. Companies are also already pointing to AI as the reason for layoffs.

    As enterprises more meaningfully adopt AI, some may take a closer look at how many employees they really need.

    In a recent TechCrunch survey, multiple enterprise VCs said AI will have a big impact on the enterprise workforce in 2026. This was particularly interesting because the survey didn’t specifically ask about it.

    Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund, expects to see affects on labor in 2026. He’s just not sure exactly what that will look like.

    “I want to see what roles that have been known for more repetition get automated, or even more complicated roles with more logic become more automated,” Bahn said. “Is it going to lead to more layoffs? Is there going to be higher productivity? Or will AI just be an augmentation for the existing labor market to be even more productive in the future? All of this seems pretty unanswered, but it seems like something big is going to happen in 2026.”

    Techcrunch event

    San Francisco
    |
    October 13-15, 2026

    Marell Evans, founder and managing partner at Exceptional Capital, predicted companies looking to increase AI spending, will pull money from their pool for labor and hiring.

    “I think on the flip side of seeing an incremental increase in AI budgets, we’ll see more human labor get cut and layoffs will continue to aggressively impact the U.S. employment rate,” Evans said.

    Rajeev Dham, managing director at Sapphire, agreed that 2026 budgets will start to shift resources from labor to AI. Jason Mendel, a venture investor at Battery Ventures, added that AI will start to surpass just being a tool to make existing workers more efficient in 2026.

    “2026 will be the year of agents as software expands from making humans more productive to automating work itself, delivering on the human-labor displacement value proposition in some areas,” Mendel said.

    Antonia Dean, a partner at Black Operator Ventures, said even if companies aren’t shifting labor budgets toward AI projects, they will likely still say AI is the reason for layoffs or a reduction in labor costs anyway.

    “The complexity here is that many enterprises, despite how ready or not they are to successfully use AI solutions, will say that they are increasing their investments in AI to explain why they are cutting back spending in other areas or trimming workforces,” Dean said. “In reality, AI will become the scapegoat for executives looking to cover for past mistakes.”

    Many AI companies argue their technology doesn’t eliminate jobs but rather helps shift workers to “deep work” or to higher-skilled jobs while AI just automates repetitive “busy work.”

    But not everyone buys that argument, and people are worried that their jobs will be automated. According to VCs who invest in that area, it doesn’t sound like those fears will be quelled in 2026.

    Rebecca Szkutak

    Source link

  • A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs | TechCrunch

    The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone.

    We’re tracking layoffs in the tech industry in 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks and understand the impact on innovation across all types of companies. As businesses continue to embrace AI and automation, this tracker serves as a reminder of the human impact of layoffs — and what could be at stake with increased innovation.

    Below you’ll find a comprehensive list of all the known tech layoffs that have occurred in 2025, which will be updated regularly. If you have a tip on a layoff, contact us here. If you prefer to remain anonymous, you can contact us here.

    December

    Payoneer

    Will let go of about 30 employees in Israel and a similar number of staff overseas, bringing the total reduction to roughly 6% of its global workforce.

    VSCO

    Laid off 24 employees as part of a restructuring to refocus on tools for professional photographers. In an internal memo seen by TechCrunch, CEO Eric Wittman said that consumer demand fell short and recent expansion efforts didn’t deliver as hoped.

    Mobileye

    Is reportedly cutting 200 employees, about 4% of its global workforce. With over 3,000 of its 4,300 employees based in Israel, most of the cuts will affect its local teams.

    Techcrunch event

    San Francisco
    |
    October 13-15, 2026

    Inside Inbound Health

    Shut down on December 1, according to an audio recording obtained by Axios Pro. The hospital-at-home startup had raised more than $50 million.

    November

    Intel

    The company continued with its stated goal of cutting a significant amount of its workforce this year, with 59 Bay Area jobs eliminated effective November 30, in a Employment Development Department filing caught by KRON4.

    HP

    Is reportedly set to cut 4,000 to 6,000 jobs worldwide by 2028 as it looks to streamline operations and leverage AI to speed up product development and boost efficiency.

    Apple

    Is cutting several sales positions handling accounts ranging from business and schools to government agencies, as it moves to streamline how it sells devices and services to businesses, schools, and government agencies, Bloomberg reports.

    Monarch Tractor

    Told employees it may lay off more than 100 workers or even shut down, according to an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch. This comes after weeks of staff cuts across the autonomous electric tractor startup’s California offices and its teams in India and Singapore.

    Playtika

    Announced plans to lay off about 20% of its workforce, 700 to 800 employees, next month, marking its fifth round of cuts since 2022, according to Calcalist. The Nasdaq-listed gaming company, valued at $1.5 billion, employs about 3,500 people.

    Pipe

    Has laid off about 200 employees, roughly half its workforce, per Fintech Business Weekly. The revenue-based small business lender, once valued at $2 billion, said the cuts are part of its push toward profitability and greater operational efficiency.

    Synopsys

    Plans to cut roughly 10% of its workforce and close several sites as part of a restructuring tied to its recent acquisition of Ansys, The Wall Street Journal reported. The layoffs, which are expected to affect about 2,000 employees, are scheduled to take place during fiscal 2026, which began November 1.

    Deepwatch

    Has laid off between 60 and 80 employees, citing artificial intelligence as one of the factors behind the decision, TechCrunch reported. The cybersecurity firm, which builds an AI-powered threat detection and response platform, employs roughly 250 people.

    Axonius

    Is reportedly cutting roughly 10% of its staff, notifying employees in early November that about 100 of its 900 workers will be laid off. The New York–based cybersecurity firm says the move aims to streamline operations.

    MyBambu

    Is set to permanently close its local operations, laying off all 141 employees in two waves, according to a filing with the Florida Department of Commerce. The Florida-headquartered fintech company’s first 100 employees were let go on October 31, with the remaining 41 slated for termination by December 31.

    Hewlett-Packard

    Is removing 52 positions at its San Jose campus, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. The layoffs, which began last month and will continue through November, affect employees across cloud development, engineering, and product management.

    October

    Amazon

    After Reuters reported that the company was planning to eliminate up to 30,000 corporate jobs, amounting to roughly 10% of its 350,000 employees in their corporate departments, Amazon shared that it would pursue an “overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.” Since that news broke, Amazon has laid off 660 employees across multiple New York City offices, with more to come through the year.

    Rivian

    Is cutting 600 jobs, about 4% of its workforce, amid an EV market pullback, marking its third layoff this year. Details of the latest layoffs remain undisclosed, while earlier cuts in June and September affected 100 to 150 employees in its commercial and manufacturing teams.

    Meta

    Has laid off approximately 600 employees across its AI infrastructure units, including the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team and other product-related roles. However, top-tier AI hires in TBD Labs, managed by new chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, will not be affected.

    Applied Materials

    Plans to cut about 4% of its workforce, or roughly 1,400 jobs, to streamline operations amid tighter U.S. semiconductor export controls.

    Handshake

    Laid off around 100 employees in October, about 15% of its 650-person U.S. workforce. The layoffs affected various roles across its recruiting business vertical. The San Francisco-based startup is an online platform connecting college students and recent graduates with employers for early-career jobs.

    Smartsheet

    Has reportedly laid off over 120 employees amid a leadership transition following CEO Mark Mader’s retirement. The enterprise software company, which grew to more than 3,300 employees, was acquired for $8.4 billion by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners earlier this year, taking it private.

    Google

    Has cut over 100 design roles in its cloud division, hitting U.S.-based teams especially hard, as the company shifts focus toward AI investments, per a CNBC report. Many affected employees have until early December to find a new role within Google, following additional layoffs across its Silicon Valley offices, including at least 50 permanent cuts in Sunnyvale.

    Paycom

    Is reportedly laying off over 500 employees due to AI and automation improving back-office efficiencies. The Oklahoma City-based HR and payroll software company will provide affected workers with severance packages, outplacement services, and access to internal job opportunities.

    September

    Just Eat

    Will eliminate around 450 jobs as part of a cost and operations review, according to Reuters. The layoffs will span multiple functions and countries, including customer service and sales. Europe’s largest food delivery company said it is increasingly using automation and AI, shifting many manual service tasks to automated systems.

    Fiverr

    Plans to cut around 250 jobs, approximately 30% of its workforce, as part of a push to become a leaner, faster, and AI-focused company, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Tel Aviv-headquartered freelance services marketplace said the restructuring will reduce management layers and position it to pursue growth with an AI-native approach.

    ZipRecruiter

    Is closing its Tel Aviv development center, cutting about 80 jobs. Led by Yosi Taguri, the office specialized in software, data, and AI research, including algorithm development. The California-based recruitment firm, founded in 2010, is trimming costs amid a challenging labor market.

    GupShup

    Has laid off at least 100 employees, including junior developers, just months after cutting nearly 200 jobs. The San Francisco-based conversational AI company, which is preparing for an IPO within two years, raised $60 million in equity and debt in July.

    xAI

    Laid off about a third of its data annotation team, cutting roughly 500 jobs, according to Business Insider. The move comes as the company shifts focus from generalist AI tutors to specialist roles, after testing workers to assess their strengths. Employees were told they’ll be paid through the end of their contracts — or November 30 at the latest — but their system access was cut immediately, Business Insider reports.

    Rivian

    Has reportedly laid off about 200 workers, or 1.5% of its staff, as the company braces for the end of federal EV tax credits under President Trump’s policy changes. The $7,500 incentive for new electric cars expires this month, adding to pressure from cooling demand. Despite the cuts, Rivian says it’s moving ahead with plans for a lower-cost model.

    Oracle

    Is cutting another 101 jobs in Seattle and 254 in San Francisco, just weeks after a wave of layoffs in August. The company, which had about 3,900 local employees before the cuts, hasn’t explained the move and declined to comment.

    Salesforce

    Is trimming another 262 jobs at its San Francisco headquarters, according to a state filing, with layoffs set to take effect November 3. The move comes just weeks after CEO Marc Benioff touted AI’s potential to cut customer support roles and follows a smaller round of cuts in Seattle and Bellevue earlier this month.

    August

    Cisco

    Will eliminate 221 positions across its Milpitas and San Francisco offices, including 157 in Santa Clara County and 64 in San Francisco, effective October 13, according to filings with California’s Employment Development Department reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. The cuts are part of the company’s broader workforce-reduction strategy.

    Restaurant365

    Laid off about 100 employees last month, around 9% of its workforce, after falling short of ambitious growth targets. The cuts affected staff across all departments. The company provides back-office software for restaurant chains.

    Oracle

    Is set to cut 101 jobs at its Santa Clara location, with notices issued on August 13 and terminations effective October 13. The company, which recently disclosed nearly 200 layoffs at its Pleasanton and Redwood City offices, is also planning to lay off 161 employees in Seattle, according to filings with the Washington state Employment Security Department.

    F5

    Is cutting 106 positions at its Seattle and Liberty Lake, Washington, offices, according to a state Employment Security Department filing. The layoffs, which affected senior engineers and managers, are part of a broader global workforce reduction, although the security and application delivery company has not disclosed the total number of employees affected.

    Peloton

    Will cut 6% of its workforce in its sixth layoff in just over a year. Peloton CEO Peter Stern said the cuts are needed to improve long-term business health.

    Kaltura

    Is cutting 10% of its workforce, or about 70 employees, as part of a cost-saving effort to reduce operating expenses by $8.5 million, marking its third round of layoffs since 2022. The corporate video software company plans to maintain and gradually grow its sales and marketing budgets, driven by a robust pipeline and growing adoption of its AI-powered offerings.

    Yotpo

    Is laying off about 200 employees, roughly 34% of its global workforce, as it shuts down its email and SMS marketing operations. The Israeli-founded unicorn is partnering with Attentive and Omnisend to continue supporting marketing services while investing in AI-powered tools like automated review summaries, smart sorting, and a new Loyalty Tiers system.

    Windsurf

    Laid off 30 employees and is now offering buyouts to the remaining 200. The AI coding startup recently acquired by Cognition has had a rocky stretch, including a near-acquisition by OpenAI and a reverse-acqui-hire by Google that saw key talent depart before Cognition stepped in. Despite initial promises to value Windsurf’s team, the deal now looks more focused on the startup’s intellectual property than its people.

    Wondery

    Is cutting 100 jobs, and its CEO, Jen Sargent, is departing. Amazon is reorganizing its audio operations, moving Wondery’s audio-only podcasts under Audible and placing video-focused shows into a new Creator Services division. Amazon acquired Wondery in 2020.

    July

    Atlassian

    Has cut 150 roles in customer service and support, following enhancements to its platform and tools that have significantly reduced support needs. The decision came via a prerecorded message from CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, just hours before co-founder Scott Farquhar urged Australia to embrace an “AI revolution” and move beyond “jobs of the past” in an Australian Press Club address. The Australian software firm was founded 2002.

    Consensys

    Is cutting about 7% of its workforce, or 47 employees, as part of a push toward profitability, Bloomberg reports. The decision follows the recent acquisition of a startup with around 30 staff, who will stay on with the company. Despite the cuts, the blockchain software company that operates the popular digital wallet MetaMask says it will continue hiring for select roles.

    Zeen

    Is shutting down operations, per a report by Business Insider. The social collaging platform aimed at creators was founded in 2019 and raised $9 million in funding. Its closure highlights the persistent challenges social media startups face in building user bases and achieving long-term growth.

    Scale AI

    Is laying off around 200 employees — roughly 14% of its workforce — and severing ties with 500 global contractors. The cuts come just weeks after Meta brought in the data-labeling startup’s CEO in a $14.3 billion deal.

    Lenovo

    Plans to cut more than 100 U.S. full-time jobs, about 3% of its workforce, including positions at its Morrisville, North Carolina, campus. As of February 2024, the PC maker employed around 5,100 workers in the U.S.

    Intel

    Is reportedly planning to lay off nearly 2,400 workers in Oregon, which is almost five times more than what was announced earlier this week. Last week, Intel announced that it will lay off more than 500 employees in Oregon, which is about 20% of its workforce, per Bloomberg.  

    Indeed + Glassdoor

    Plan to eliminate approximately 1,300 jobs combined as part of a larger restructuring effort to combine their operations and focus on AI. The layoff will mostly affect employees in the U.S., particularly in the R&D, HR, and sustainability teams, according to an internal memo by Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba, the CEO of Recruit Holdings, which is the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor.

    Eigen Lab

    Has laid off 29 employees as part of its reorganization, per a report by Blockworks. The Seattle-based research and engineering startup recently launched EigenCloud, a platform that provides blockchain-level trust guarantees for any Web 2.0 or web3 application. The reduction will affect 25% of the company’s workforce. Eigen Labs said it had raised $70 million in tokens from a16z Crypto in June.

    Microsoft

    Will cut 9,000 employees, which is less than 4% of its global workforce across teams, role types, and geographies. The reduction follows a series of layoffs earlier this year: It cut less than 1% of the headcount in January, more than 6,000 in May, and at least 300 in June.

    ByteDance

    Is laying off 65 employees in Bellevue, Washington, according to media reports. The parent company of TikTok arrived in Seattle in 2021 and has been expanding its presence there by growing its TikTok Shop online shopping division.

    June

    TomTom

    Announced on June 30 that the company is cutting 300 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as part of organizational restructuring within its sales and support divisions amid the AI shift. The startup is an Amsterdam-based location tech startup that provides navigation and mapping products.

    Rivian

    Has reduced its headcount by approximately 140 employees, accounting for roughly 1% of its total workforce. The recent layoffs mostly affected Rivian’s manufacturing team.

    Bumble

    Announced in an SEC filing that it will cut approximately 240 jobs, or 30% of its workforce, to enhance operational efficiency and allocate the resulting savings to the development of new products and technologies, according to a CNBC report. The layoff will help the online dating app save $40 million annually, per the report.

    Klue

    Has reportedly laid off 85 employees, which accounts for approximately 40% of its workforce. The Vancouver-based startup sells software products that use artificial intelligence for business intelligence. It helps sales professionals at tech companies gather information on competitors to improve their sales.

    Google

    Has downsized its smart TV division by 25% of its 300-member team to adjust its strategy, per reports. Funding for the smart TV division, including Google TV and Android TV, has been cut by 10%, but investment in AI projects has been raised.

    Intel

    Says that it plans to lay off 15% to 20% of workers in its Intel Foundry division starting in July. Intel Foundry designs, manufactures, and packages semiconductors for external clients. Intel’s total workforce was 108,900 people as of December 2024, according to the company’s annual regulatory filing. It also confirmed to TechCrunch that it plans to wind down its auto business.

    Playtika

    Announced that it is letting go of around 90 employees, with 40 in Israel and 50 in Poland. The most recent round of job cuts comes after the Israel-based gaming company laid off 50 employees a few weeks ago.

    Airtime

    Has let go of around 25 employees from the 58-person team, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Evernote’s founder Phil Libin launched the video startup in 2020, offering Airtime Creator and Airtime Camera.

    Microsoft

    Is laying off more employees, just a few weeks after announcing a job cut of over 6,500 in May, which was around 3% of its global workforce. The most recent layoffs affected software engineers, product managers, technical program managers, marketers, and legal counsels.

    May

    Hims & Hers

    Plans to downsize its workforce by letting go of 68 employees, approximately 4% of its total staff, per Reuters. The San Francisco telehealth platform said that its layoffs were unrelated to a U.S. ban on producing large quantities of the weight-loss drug Wegovy. The startup said it intends to keep on recruiting employees who fit in with its long-term expansion plans.

    Amazon

    Is reportedly laying off around 100 employees from its devices and services division, which encompasses various businesses like the Alexa voice assistant, Echo smart speakers, Ring video doorbells, and Zoox robotaxis. The company has reduced its workforce by approximately 27,000 since the start of 2022 to cut costs.

    Microsoft

    Will cut over 6,500 jobs, affecting 3% of its worldwide workforce. As of June, the Seattle-headquartered company had a total of 228,000 employees globally. It would be one of the company’s biggest layoffs since it cut 10,000 employees in 2023.

    Chegg

    Reportedly plans to let go of 248 employees, or about 22% of its workforce, to reduce expenses and improve efficiency, it said. The San Francisco-based edtech startup, which offers textbook rentals and tutoring services, has seen a drop in web traffic for months as students opt for AI tools instead of traditional edtech platforms.

    Match

    Is reducing its workforce by 13% as part of a reorganization that aims to reduce costs, shore up margins, and streamline its organizational structure.

    CrowdStrike

    Is laying off 5% of its global workforce, or around 500 people. The company said the layoffs were part of “a strategic plan (the ‘Plan’) to evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies as the Company continues to scale its business with focus and discipline to meet its goal of $10 billion in ending [Annual Recurring Revenue]” in its 8-K filing.

    General Fusion

    Has cut roughly 25% of its current workforce. The Vancouver-based company, which is developing a technology to generate fusion energy, has raised $440 million from investors, including Jeff Bezos, Temasek, and BDC Capital.

    Deep Instinct

    Reduced its headcount by 20 employees, accounting for 10% of its total workforce. In April 2023, the Israeli cybersecurity startup had previously laid off a similar number of employees during a round of layoffs.

    Beam

    Has shut down its operations months after announcing major expansion plans, per Sifted. The British climate startup has let go of approximately 200 employees, according to a LinkedIn post by James Reynolds, the head of talent.

    April

    NetApp

    Is reportedly eliminating 700 jobs, affecting 6% of its total workforce, as it reorganizes for its operational efficiency. The company, based in San Francisco, provides data storage, cloud services, and CloudOps solutions for businesses.

    Electronic Arts

    Is reportedly letting go of approximately 300 to 400 employees, including around 100 at Respawn Entertainment, to focus on its “long-term strategic priorities,” according to Bloomberg.

    Expedia

    Is laying off around 3% of its employees as part of its restructuring. The job cuts will mainly affect midlevel positions in the product and technology teams. The latest round of layoffs comes after the company let go of hundreds of employees from its marketing team globally in early March.

    Cars24

    Has reduced its workforce by about 200 employees in its product and technology divisions as part of a restructuring measure. The India-based e-commerce platform for pre-owned vehicles provides a range of services like buying and selling pre-owned cars, financing, insurance, driver-on-demand, and more. In 2023, the SoftBank-backed startup raised $450 million at a valuation of $3.3 billion.

    Meta

    Is letting go of over 100 employees in its Reality Labs division, which manages virtual reality and wearable technology, according to The Verge. The job cuts affect employees developing VR experiences for Meta’s Quest headsets and staff working on hardware operations to streamline similar work between the two teams.

    Intel

    Announced its plan to lay off more than 21,000 employees, or roughly 20% of its workforce, in April. The move comes ahead of Intel’s Q1 earnings call helmed by recently appointed CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over from longtime chief Pat Gelsinger last year.

    GM

    Is laying off 200 people at its Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck facility in Michigan, which produces GM’s electric vehicles. The cuts come amid the EV slowdown and is not caused by tariffs, according to a report.

    Zopper

    Has reportedly let go of around 100 employees since the start of 2025. Earlier this week, about 50 employees from the tech and product teams were let go in the latest round of job cuts. The India-based insurtech startup has raised a total of $125 million to date.

    Turo

    Will reduce its workforce by 150 positions following its decision not to proceed with its IPO, per Bloomberg. The San Francisco-based car rental startup, which had about 1,000 staff in 2024, said the layoffs will bolster its long-term growth plans during economic uncertainty.

    GupShup

    Laid off roughly 200 employees to improve efficiency and profitability. It’s the startup’s second round of layoffs in five months, following the job cuts of around 300 employees in December. The conversational AI company, backed by Tiger Global and Fidelity, was last valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. The startup is based in San Francisco and operates in India.

    Forto

    Has reportedly eliminated 200 jobs, affecting around one-third of its employees. The German logistics startup reduced a significant number of sales staff.

    Wicresoft

    Will stop its operations in China, affecting around 2,000 employees. The move came after Microsoft decided to end outsourcing after-sales support to Wicresoft amid increasing trade tensions. Wicresoft, Microsoft’s first joint venture in China, was founded in 2022 and operates in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. It has over 10,000 employees.

    Five9

    Plans to cut 123 jobs, affecting about 4% of its workforce, according to a report by MarketWatch. The software company prioritizes key strategic areas like artificial intelligence for profitable growth.

    Google

    Has laid off hundreds of employees in its platforms and devices division, which covers Android, Pixel phones, the Chrome browser, and more, according to The Information.

    Microsoft

    Is contemplating additional layoffs that could happen by May, Business Insider reported, citing anonymous sources. The company is said to be discussing reducing the number of middle managers and non-coders in a bid to increase the ratio of programmers to product managers.

    Automattic

    The WordPress.com developer is laying off 16% of its workforce across departments. Before the layoffs, the company’s website showed it had 1,744 employees, so more than 270 staff may have been laid off.

    Canva

    Has let go of 10 to 12 technical writers approximately nine months after telling its employees to use generative AI tools wherever possible. The company, which had around 5,500 staff in 2024, was valued at $26 billion after a secondary stock sale in 2024.

    March

    Northvolt

    Has laid off 2,800 employees, affecting 62% of its total staff. The layoffs come weeks after the embattled Swedish battery maker filed for bankruptcy.

    Block

    Let go of 931 employees, around 8% of its workforce, as part of a reorganization, according to an internal email seen by TechCrunch. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of the fintech company, wrote in the email that the layoffs were not for financial reasons or to replace workers with AI.

    Brightcove

    Has laid off 198 employees, who make up about two-thirds of its U.S. workforce, per a media report. The layoff comes a month after the company was acquired by Bending Spoons, an Italian app developer, for $233 million. Brightcove had 600 employees worldwide, with 300 in the U.S., as of December 2023.

    Acxiom

    Has reportedly laid off 130 employees, or 3.5% of its total workforce of 3,700 people. Acxiom is owned by IPG, and the news comes just a day after IPG and Omnicom Group shareholders approved the companies’ potential merger.

    Sequoia Capital

    Plans to close its office in Washington, D.C., and let go of its policy team there by the end of March, TechCrunch has confirmed. Sequoia opened its Washington office five years ago to deepen its relationship with policymakers. Three full-time employees are expected to be affected, per Forbes.

    Siemens

    Announced plans to let go of approximately 5,600 jobs globally in its automation and electric-vehicle charging businesses as part of efforts to improve competitiveness.

    HelloFresh

    Is reportedly laying off 273 employees, closing its distribution center in Grand Prairie, Texas, and consolidating to another site in Irving to manage the volume in the region.

    Otorio

    Has cut 45 employees, more than half of its workforce, after being acquired by cybersecurity company Armis for $120 million in March.

    ActiveFence

    Will reportedly reduce 22 employees, representing 7% of its workforce. Most of those affected are based in Israel as the company undergoes a streamlining process. The New York- and Tel Aviv-headquartered cybersecurity firm has raised $100 million at a valuation of about $500 million in 2021.

    D-ID

    Will cut 22 jobs, affecting nearly a quarter of its total workforce, following the announcement of the AI startup’s strategic partnership with Microsoft.

    NASA

    Announced it will be shutting down several of its offices in accordance with Elon Musk’s DOGE, including its Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy and the DEI branch in the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.

    Zonar Systems

    Has reportedly laid off some staff, according to LinkedIn posts from ex-employees. The company has not confirmed the layoffs, and it is currently unknown how many workers were affected.

    Wayfair

    Announced plans to let go of 340 employees in its technology division as part of a new restructuring effort.

    HPE

    Will cut 2,500 employees, or 5% of its total staff, in response to its shares sliding 19% in the first fiscal quarter.

    TikTok

    Will cut up to 300 workers in Dublin, accounting for roughly 10% of the company’s workforce in Ireland. 

    LiveRamp

    Announced it will lay off 65 employees, affecting 5% of its total workforce.

    Ola Electric

    Is reportedly set to lay off over 1,000 employees and contractors in a cost-cutting effort. It’s the second round of cuts for the company in just five months.

    Rec Room

    Reduced its total headcount by 16% as the gaming startup shifts its focus to be “scrappier” and “more efficient.”

    ANS Commerce

    Was shut down just three years after it was acquired by Flipkart. It is currently unknown how many employees were affected.

    February

    HP

    Will cut up to 2,000 jobs as part of its “Future Now” restructuring plan that hopes to save the company $300 million before the end of its fiscal year.

    GrubHub

    Announced 500 job cuts after it was sold to Wonder Group for $650 million. The number of cuts affected more than 20% of its previous workforce. 

    Autodesk

    Announced plans to lay off 1,350 employees, affecting 9% of its total workforce, in an attempt to reshape its GTM model. The company is also making reductions in its facilities, though it does not plan to close any offices.

    Google

    Is planning to cut employees in its People Operations and cloud organizations teams in a new reorganization effort. The company is offering a voluntary exit program to U.S.-based People Operations employees.

    Nautilus

    Reduced its headcount by 25 employees, accounting for 16% of its total workforce. The company is planning to release a commercial version of its proteome analysis platform in 2026.

    eBay

    Will reportedly cut a few dozen employees in Israel, potentially affecting 10% of its 250-person workforce in the country.

    Starbucks

    Cut 1,100 jobs in a reorganizing effort that affected its tech workers. The coffee chain will now outsource some tech work to third-party employees.

    Commercetools

    Laid off dozens of employees over the last few weeks, including around 10% of staff in one day, after failing to meet its sales growth targets. The “headless commerce” platform raised money at a $1.9 billion valuation just a few years ago.

    Dayforce

    Will cut roughly 5% of its current workforce in a new efficiency drive to increase profitability and growth.

    Expedia

    Laid off more employees in a new effort to cut costs, though the total number is unknown. Last year, the travel giant cut about 1,500 roles in its Product & Technology division.

    Skybox Security

    Has ceased operations and has laid off its employees after selling its business and technology to Israeli cybersecurity company Tufin. The cuts affect roughly 300 people. 

    HerMD

    Is shutting down its operations after shifting from a brick-and-mortar model to a fully virtual women’s healthcare provider. The startup, which raised $18 million in 2023, has not disclosed how many employees are affected, saying recent layoffs were tied to its former in-person business.

    Zendesk

    Cut 51 jobs in its San Francisco headquarters, according to state filings with the Employment Development Department. The SaaS startup previously reduced its headcount by 8% in 2023.

    Vendease

    Has cut 120 employees, affecting 44% of its total staff. It’s the Y Combinator-backed Nigerian startup’s second layoff round in just five months.

    Logically

    Reportedly laid off dozens of employees as part of a new cost-cutting effort that aims to ensure “long-term success” in the startup’s mission to curb misinformation online.

    Blue Origin

    Will lay off about 10% of its workforce, affecting more than 1,000 employees. According to an email to staff obtained by CNN, the cuts will largely have an impact on positions in engineering and program management. 

    Redfin

    Announced in an SEC filing that it will cut around 450 positions between February and July 2025, with a complete restructuring set to be completed in the fall, following its new partnership with Zillow.

    Sophos

    Is laying off 6% of its total workforce, the cybersecurity firm confirmed to TechCrunch. The cuts come less than two weeks after Sophos acquired Secureworks for $859 million.

    Zepz

    Will cut nearly 200 employees as it introduces redundancy measures and closes down its operations in Poland and Kenya.

    Unity

    Reportedly conducted another round of layoffs. It’s unknown how many employees were affected.

    JustWorks

    Cut nearly 200 employees, CEO Mike Seckler announced in a note to employees, citing “potential adverse events” like a recession or rising interest rates.

    Bird

    Cut 120 jobs, affecting roughly one-third of its total workforce, TechCrunch exclusively learned. The move comes just a year after the Dutch startup cut 90 employees following its rebrand.

    Sprinklr

    Laid off about 500 employees, affecting 15% of its workforce, citing poor business performance. The new cuts follow two earlier layoff rounds for the company that affected roughly 200 employees.

    Sonos

    Reportedly let go of approximately 200 employees, according to The Verge. The company previously cut 100 employees as part of a layoff round in August 2024. 

    Workday

    Laid off 1,750 employees, as originally reported by Bloomberg and confirmed independently by TechCrunch. The cuts affect roughly 8.5% of the enterprise HR platform’s total headcount.

    Okta

    Laid off 180 employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The cuts come just over one year after the access and identity management giant let go of 400 workers.

    Cruise

    Is laying off 50% of its workforce, including CEO Marc Whitten and several other top executives, as it prepares to shut down operations. What remains of the autonomous vehicle company will move under General Motors.

    Salesforce

    Is reportedly eliminating more than 1,000 jobs. The cuts come as the giant is actively recruiting and hiring workers to sell new AI products.

    January

    Cushion

    Has shut down operations, CEO Paul Kesserwani announced on LinkedIn. The fintech startup’s post-money valuation in 2022 was $82.4 million, according to PitchBook.

    Placer.ai

    Laid off 150 employees based in the U.S., affecting roughly 18% of its total workforce, in an effort to reach profitability.

    Amazon

    Laid off dozens of workers in its communications department in order to help the company “move faster, increase ownership, strengthen our culture, and bring teams closer to customers.”

    Stripe

    Is laying off 300 people, according to a leaked memo reported by Business Insider. However, according to the memo, the fintech giant is planning to grow its total headcount by 17%. 

    Textio

    Laid off 15 employees as the augmented writing startup undergoes a restructuring effort.

    Pocket FM

    Is cutting 75 employees in an effort to “ensure the long-term sustainability and success” of the company. The audio company last cut 200 writers in July 2024 months after partnering with ElevenLabs.

    Aurora Solar

    Is planning to cut 58 employees in response to an “ongoing macroeconomic challenges and continued uncertainty in the solar industry.”

    Meta

    Announced in an internal memo that it will cut 5% of its staff targeting “low performers” as the company prepares for “an intense year.” As of its latest quarterly report, Meta currently has more than 72,000 employees.

    Wayfair

    Will cut up to 730 jobs, affecting 3% of its total workforce, as it plans to exit operations in Germany and focus on physical retailers.

    Pandion

    Is shutting down its operations, affecting 63 employees. The delivery startup said employees will be paid through January 15 without severance.

    Icon

    Is laying off 114 employees as part of a team realignment, per a new WARN notice filing, focusing its efforts on a robotic printing system.

    Altruist

    Eliminated 37 jobs, affecting roughly 10% of its total workforce, even as the company pursues “aggressive” hiring.

    Aqua Security

    Is cutting dozens of employees across its global markets as part of a strategic reorganization to increase profitability.

    SolarEdge Technologies

    Plans to lay off 400 employees globally. It’s the company’s fourth layoff round since January 2024 as the solar industry as a whole faces a downturn.

    Level

    The fintech startup, founded in 2018, abruptly shut down earlier this year. Per an email from CEO Paul Aaron, the closure follows an unsuccessful attempt to find a buyer, though Employer.com has a new offer under consideration to acquire the company post-shutdown.

    This list updates regularly.

    On April 24, 2025, we corrected the number of layoffs that happened in March.

    Kate Park, Cody Corrall, Alyssa Stringer

    Source link

  • Amazon Workers Issue Warning About Company’s ‘All-Costs-Justified’ Approach to AI Development

    Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development” could cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday.

    Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in.

    Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company. A senior engineering manager with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed because they believe a manufactured “race” to build the best AI has empowered executives to trample workers and the environment.

    “The current generation of AI has become almost like a drug that companies like Amazon obsess over, use as a cover to lay people off, and use the savings to pay for data centers for AI products no one is paying for,” says the employee, who like others in this story, asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from their bosses.

    Amazon, along with other big tech companies, is in the midst of investing billions of dollars to construct new data centers to train and run generative AI systems. This includes tools helping workers write code and consumer-facing services such as Amazon’s shopping chatbot, Rufus. It’s easy to see why Amazon is pursuing AI. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that Rufus was on track to increase Amazon’s sales by $10 billion annually. It “is continuing to get better and better,” he said.

    AI systems demand significant power, which has forced utility companies to turn to coal plants and other carbon-emitting sources of energy to support the data center boom. The open letter demands that Amazon abandon carbon fuel sources at its data centers, bar its AI technologies from being used to carry out surveillance and mass deportation, and stop forcing employees to use AI in their work. “We, the undersigned Amazon employees, have serious concerns about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and our most important years to reverse the climate crisis,” the letter states.

    Paresh Dave

    Source link

  • Trump’s plan to dismantle Education Department takes first major step

    WASHINGTON, D.C.: The U.S. Department of Education is starting to break apart its major offices and hand their duties to other agencies — an early sign of how U.S. President Donald Trump might follow through on his campaign promise to shut the department down completely.

    Several offices that support the nation’s schools and colleges will be moved to departments such as Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and even the State Department. Officials say federal funding for schools and colleges will continue as Congress intended, but they have not said whether current Education Department employees will keep their jobs.

    Since taking office, Trump has pushed to get rid of the Education Department, saying it is too influenced by liberal ideas. Department leaders have already been preparing to split up their work among other federal agencies. In July, the Supreme Court allowed major layoffs that cut the department’s staff in half.

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon has recently begun publicly arguing that her department should be closed, saying on social media that states and other federal agencies could handle its main tasks — such as giving out grants and answering questions from schools — more effectively.

    But questions remain about whether other agencies are prepared to take on these responsibilities. The Education Department manages billions of dollars in federal aid and helps states interpret complicated education laws. Closing it will test whether the administration can make the transition smoothly or whether students who depend heavily on federal support — including those in rural and low-income schools and students with disabilities — will be harmed.

    Money Will Still Flow

    Although most school funding in the U.S. comes from state and local governments, the Education Department plays a crucial role in sending federal money to schools and colleges. Officials say that money will continue to flow, but often through different agencies. For example:

    • The Department of Labor will now manage major funding programs, including Title I money for schools serving low-income students. Labor already took over adult education programs in June.
    • Health and Human Services will handle grants that help parents who are attending college.
    • The State Department will run foreign-language education programs.
    • The Interior Department will oversee programs for Native American students.

    One of the Education Department’s biggest jobs is managing the US$1.6 trillion federal student loan system. For now, this will not change, though both Trump and McMahon have said another agency might be better suited to run it. Pell Grants and federal student loans will still be issued, and borrowers must continue making payments.

    The FAFSA website, which students use to apply for financial aid, will stay open, and the department will continue to help families with the application. The department will also continue to oversee college accreditation, which allows schools to accept federal aid.

    For now, the department will continue to handle student disability funding, though McMahon has said it could eventually be transferred to Health and Human Services.

    The Education Department also oversees investigations into schools accused of discrimination — including cases involving disability rights, sex discrimination, racial discrimination, and shared ancestry bias. These responsibilities will stay within the department for now, though McMahon has suggested they could be moved to the Department of Justice.

    However, after the mass layoffs in March, the Office for Civil Rights has been operating with far fewer staff. The cuts have raised doubts about whether it can reduce its enormous backlog of student and family complaints. Department data shows it has been resolving fewer civil rights cases even as new complaints continue to rise.

    Source link

  • Verizon Begins Laying Off Thousands of Workers

    Telecom giant Verizon has begun laying off some 13,000 employees as part of a new reorganization initiative. Approximately a week ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Verizon was considering job cuts. Now, the layoffs have begun, according to an email viewed by Gizmodo.

    “Our current cost structure limits our ability to invest significantly in our customer value proposition,” wrote Verizon’s new-ish CEO, Dan Schulma, in an email sent Thursday and shared with Gizmodo (the Journal originally reported on the email). “We must reorient our entire company around delivering for and delighting our customers,” the top executive added.

    Yes, to “delight” customers, the company must apparently very much not delight its workforce. Schulman, who took over the top spot in October, said in the email that the layoffs would reduce Verizon’s “outsourced and outside labor expenses.” To help the workers who are losing their jobs, Verizon has established a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund, Schulman said. This fund will “focus on skill development, digital training and job placement to help our people take their next steps,” he shared.

    The CEO added that technological change was sweeping through the economy. “Changes in technology and in the economy are impacting the workforce across all industries,” he wrote. “Change is necessary, but it can be difficult—especially when it affects valued teammates. It’s important that we direct our energy and resources to set Verizon on a path to success. The actions we’re taking are designed to make us faster and more focused, positioning our company to deliver for our customers while continuing to capture new growth opportunities.”

    When it comes to job security, this has been a tough year for tech workers. Amazon recently announced 14,000 layoffs, Accenture and Synopsis have announced thousands of layoffs, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle have made similarly dour announcements, and Intel has promised to reduce its workforce by a whopping 25,000. There are many other tech companies that have made similar moves over the last twelve months.

    Yes, lots and lots of people are getting fired right now, and, according to reports, it’s increasingly difficult for entry-level workers to find positions. Some people blame AI (which is promising to help America’s C-suite gut certain segments of their corporate workforce) while others merely blame our shitty economy, which seems to be suffering under the yoke of the Trump administration’s dopy fiscal policies. There’s no reason why both can’t be to blame. Whatever the cause, one thing is clear: Silicon Valley is in its downsizing era, and it’s not so much fun.

    Lucas Ropek

    Source link

  • This 26-year-old was laid off from his ‘dream job’ at PwC building AI agents. He’s worried the tech he built has led to more job cuts | Fortune

    Titans of industry like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Intel have all been slashing staff, and employees are hand-wringing about being next on the chopping block. Donald King, a 26-year-old who built AI agents for PwC, never thought he’d be the next one out the door—but he soon realized why consultants are called “hatchet-men.”

    After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, King landed a job at one of the “Big Four” consulting giants: PwC. He packed his bags and moved to New York to start his role as an associate in technology consulting, working with major clients, including Oracle, during his first year. But everything changed when PwC announced a $1 billion investment in AI; King was already intrigued by the tech, so he pitched himself to join the company’s AI factory team. Working 60 to 80 hours a week, he immersed himself in the tech, even throwing knowledge-sharing AI agent block parties within the firm that drew up to 250 participants. King logged a ton of hours—sometimes at the expense of his weekends—but was confident he was excelling in his role as a product manager and data scientist.

    “I was coding and managing a team onshore and offshore. It was crazy, it’s like, ‘Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 [companies],’” King tells Fortune. “[It was] my dream job…I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm.”

    Although King was proving himself as a key AI talent for PwC, he did begin to question the impact of his work. The AI agents King was building for major corporations could undoubtedly automate swaths of human roles—perhaps even entire job departments. One Microsoft Teams agent his group created mimicked an actual person, and King was a little spooked. 

    “We had a late night call with all the boys that are building this thing, like, ‘What the hell are we building right now?’” King says. “Just saying ‘Treat them like humans’ is probably not the best way to think about it.”

    Behind the scenes, a layoff was brewing—but this time, for King. In October 2024, just eight months into his final role at PwC, the Gen Zer presented his winning project from the OpenAI hackathon: a fleet of AI agents that automated manual tasks. King was proud and felt confident in his place at the firm, but two hours later, PwC called King to inform him he was being laid off. The 26-year-old recorded the meeting and posted it on TikTok, raking up more than 75,000 likes and 2.1 million views. Commenters under his videos expressed shock that King would be let go after winning the hackathon.

    “I thought I was safe, especially after I won first place,” King says. “I just got a little blindsided.”

    King clarifies he doesn’t think there were any “nefarious” intentions behind his layoff, reasoning he was likely a random staffer dismissed after the firm had overhired in previous years. However, he does connect the dots between the AI agents he built for PwC customers and the layoffs that soon ensued at those client companies. 

    Fortune reached out to PwC for comment. 

    King believes his AI agents may have been connected to layoffs 

    While King doesn’t believe his former role at PwC was automated, he recognizes that the AI agents he built likely had an impact on others. The year after his layoff, King observed that some of the Fortune 500 clients he served were implementing staffing cuts. Those AI agents he helped create may have had a hand in the layoffs. 

    “It’s 100% connected,” King says. “I knew that consulting was a hatchet-man type job, I knew you’re going in to potentially lay people off, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

    While King believes AI agents are akin to the reasoning power of a five-year-old, they still know “all the corpus of information in the world” and can automate mundane tasks. Oftentimes, that means entry-level jobs are most at risk of being disrupted. 

    “It’s automating tasks, 100%, those are gone,” King says. “If your job is doing those menial types of things, if you’re just emailing a spreadsheet back and forth, you can kiss your job goodbye.”

    Pivoting to his new life purpose: founding a marketing agency 

    While being on PwC’s AI team may have once been his dream job, the layoff didn’t crush his spirit. 

    “I’m grateful for it happening…It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but then it turned into the best thing,” King says. “Overall, [I’m] very grateful that I got laid off.”

    In the aftermath of being let go, King says he was inundated with job offers from major tech companies to join their AI operations. However, the scrappy young entrepreneur sidelined the idea of returning to a nine-to-five gig; instead, King started his own marketing agency, AMDK. The business officially launched in December last year, less than two months after being laid off from PwC. 

    So far, King says AMDK has roped in clients ranging from small companies to billion-dollar enterprises, many of whom are looking for AI agents of their own. His end goal is to build a swarm of agents that help companies with their back ends—but after his experience on PwC’s AI team, he says he’s being cautious about the ramifications of his creations. He’s still learning the ropes of entrepreneurship, but wouldn’t trade the highs and lows for a salaried corporate job.

    “This is my purpose in life, versus this is someone else’s purpose,” King says. “[I’m] way happier.”

    Emma Burleigh

    Source link

  • Another Major Tech Company Just Announced Thousands of Layoffs

    As a dark economic cloud settles over Silicon Valley, yet another giant tech firm has announced thousands of layoffs.

    Synopsys, a large tech company that supplies services to the semiconductor industry, seems to have signaled over 2,000 layoffs, SFGate reports, citing a recently filed SEC document. The document states:

    On November 9, 2025, the Board of Directors of Synopsys, Inc. (“Synopsys”) approved a restructuring plan that is expected to result in the termination of approximately 10% of Synopsys’ workforce as of fiscal 2025 year-end (the “Restructuring Plan”).

    SFGate reports that, as of the end of fiscal year 2024, Synopsys had about 20,000 employees (the company’s website actually claims it has 28,000)—hence the 2,000 figure. The layoffs did not come out of nowhere, however. Synopsys recently finished its acquisition of a company called Ansys, a detail that is noted in the SEC doc:

    This restructuring will allow Synopsys to invest in key growth opportunities and drive business efficiencies following the completion of its acquisition of ANSYS, Inc.

    With acquisitions and restructuring, layoffs are common, so, in that sense, the job loss isn’t unexpected. The procurement of Ansys, which describes itself as the “leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems,” was originally announced last year. The acquisition was completed this summer, Synopsys previously announced.

    The company has also said that it expects that a majority of the layoffs will take place “in fiscal year 2026” and that it will be able to mostly complete its “Restructuring Plan by the end of fiscal year 2027, subject to local law and consultation requirements.”

    ″We are taking a number of targeted steps to improve our efficiency to scale the business, accelerate our strategy and capitalize on the highest-growth opportunities,” the company told Gizmodo, when reached for comment. “These initiatives will result in reducing our global workforce over the course of our fiscal year 2026. We do not take these measures lightly and are committed to treating impacted employees with respect and providing support through the transition.”

    Gizmodo reached out to Synopsys for more information.

    This has been a particularly sucky season for the tech industry, although the overall U.S. economy isn’t in great shape at the moment. A recently published report showed that October was the worst month for job losses in the U.S. since 2003, and leading the pack for terminations was the tech industry. Another report, which came out earlier this summer, suggested that many entry level tech jobs are being swallowed up by AI. I guess every gravy train has to an end at some point.

    Lucas Ropek

    Source link

  • Employees Can Tell When You’re Using AI to Deliver Bad News. Here’s How

    The spreading use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not only a potentially game-changing workplace development, but one driven by employers urging staff to increase their productivity by adopting the tech to automate repetitive tasks. New data indicates just how often workers are using apps to compose email and other business communications — including managers’ employee reviews and layoff notices that usually require high doses of human consideration and empathy that bots can’t replicate.

    Those insights come from email strategy and service provider ZeroBounce, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. employees and managers about their AI habits in composing texts for work. It found 56 percent of respondents reporting they use bots anywhere from a few times per week to “always,” with just 20 saying they never do. Not only did 52 percent of participants say using apps leaves them feeling more confident in their workplace writing, but 10 percent said they had delayed, or entirely dropped plans to send business email during the most recent AI outage their company suffered.

    What ZeroBounce looked at from there was how discerning respondents were in turning to AI when writing sensitive messages or reports in addition to run of the mill email.

    Over a third, or 35 percent of participants said they’d used bots to compose those more delicate texts, with 14 percent saying they’ve cut and pasted confidential content directly into bots without editing the results. Just under 10 percent of respondents admitted they no longer felt capable of writing those sensitive reports or notes — or even regular email — after having become over-reliant on apps for that.

    The potential problems with that increasing use of bots in writing became clearer when respondents spoke of their experiences of being on the receiving end of those exchanges.

    Over a fifth of respondents said they’d “caught a coworker using the exact same Al email I have seen before,” which could shape how recipients viewed the importance of the message, and industriousness of the colleague sending it. Even more significantly, however, more than a quarter of participants said they believed performance reviews they’d received had been written by bots, with 16 percent saying they’d gotten layoff notices they suspected were AI-generated.

    There are several reasons for those suspicions. Those included sensitive texts composed respondents had gotten containing excessive, even robotic formality and unnatural word choice that bots are infamous for. Overly polished, ornate, or repetitive phrasing were other notorious causes for doubt.

    Then there were the survey answers from managers themselves about their use of apps in writing sensitive messages that further fanned those misgivings.

    For example, 41 of participating executives said they’d indeed relied on AI “to draft or revise a performance review.” Another 24 percent of respondents said they’d used apps to compose a performance warning, and 17 percent had done so to inform an employee they were being terminated.

    The problem with that, ZeroBounce said of its findings, is if the positive use of AI in automating all kinds of repetitive, boring, or less critical workplace tasks becomes too reflexive. When it happens, it said some users immediately turn to the tech to compose critical communications requiring maximum human input, analysis, and even compassion that bots can’t produce.

    “The (survey) results are part cautionary tale, part Black Mirror episode,” the introduction to the survey’s results said. “AI has crept into our inboxes, sometimes invisibly, and many of us aren’t sure who’s writing or feeling on the other end.”

    Recognizing that, 40 percent of participating employees said they thought sensitive emails, evaluations, or notices about promotions and terminations should never be Al-assisted. Another 56 percent of respondents said those texts may be crafted with some support from apps to increase clarity, but that should never come at the expense of full human input and personalization.

    A separate survey offered some possible reasons for why managers would rely on AI as much as the ZeroBounce study revealed. Language learning platform Preply questioned an unspecified number of U.S. employees and managers about termination messaging they’d been involved with, and found delivery and phrasing of that bad news often sorely lacking.

    For starters, it found an average of 55 percent of participating managers “who have fired someone (had) not received training on how to navigate the process.” Perhaps not surprisingly, 65 percent of respondents who’d been laid off said “the manager handled the situation poorly.” While the survey didn’t ask how often AI was used to formulate those termination announcements, there’s some reason to think bots may have at times been involved.

    With word and term repetition a frequent AI vice in these early days of the tech’s development and output, use of the phrase “letting you go” appearing in 45.6 percent of all layoff announcements examined may indicate bot involvement. Meanwhile, “effective immediately” and “terminating your employment” were also mentioned in over 28 percent of all dismissals, with “no longer require services” and “parting ways” used in over 20 percent of cases.

    All of which indicates that at this point in its evolution, AI’s automating abilities are impressive, but not always adapted to workplace scenarios requiring human discretion and empathy.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

    Bruce Crumley

    Source link

  • Experts Worry AI is Driving Layoffs, Even if It’s Not Delivering on its Promises

    Amid a flurry of tech industry layoffs, Amazon’s recent culling of some 14,000 staff stands out for one dramatic reason: it was blamed, for the most part, on advances in AI — a technology that Amazon Senior Vice President Beth Galetti wrote was “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” NBC News noted. But experts are increasingly worried that companies embracing AI in an effort to drive down costs while driving up efficiency and profitability may not actually be gaining anything from adopting the tech. The news might make you reconsider how you’re rolling out AI to your own company.

    The news outlet quotes David Autor, an MIT economics professor, explaining one key issue he thinks may be behind some layoffs that are being blamed on AI. “It’s much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’,” he noted, compared to a company simply fessing up to the truth and issuing a statement like, “‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc.’.” He even went a little further, and argued that it was “wise” to attribute the reason to deploy AI tech, “whether or not AI were the reason,” possibly because of the optics of this ploy: it makes a company look like it’s operating at the cutting edge, and it’s a positive spin on otherwise devastating news.

    In the light of this, and very interestingly, NBC News also notes that an Amazon representative later tried to walk back the notion, promoted by Galetti, that AI was the motivating reason behind taking away the income of 14,000 people, and instead tried to argue it was merely an extension of a plan to “strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers” that was begun last year.

    This somewhat contradicts a statement made by Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy in June, where he set out how he feels AI is going to revolutionize both the customer-facing work Amazon does, and also its internal operation. “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote. 

    But maybe there’s something deeper going on here. As NBC notes, a recent survey by consultancy giant Deloitte found that only 10 percent of companies that had rolled out AI tools broadly said they saw “significant return on investment from agentic AI,” which is thought to be the most cutting-edge of AI tools, and the system that can, it’s promised, take over some mundane office tasks for the average worker. 

    The message that AI is going to save people time is actually broadly supported by many of the workers who actually use AI, a recent survey found. The Global Workforce of the Future annual report by staffing and tech advisory company Adecco Group found that 77 percent of respondents who use AI said it let them carry out tasks that they hadn’t been able to previously, and 71 percent said there was nothing holding them back from an increased AI use. Meanwhile, just 20 percent of U.S. respondents said they thought AI would destroy jobs, and 90 percent thought it’d actually create new jobs.

    What’s going on here? And what does it mean for your company?

    Firstly, the jury really is still out on whether or not AI can truly transform businesses to the extent that they can successfully cut costs by eliminating certain types of worker — a separate survey found, for example, that some AI use may actually be costing companies time and money rather than saving it. So, if you are deploying AI tools into your business, the trick might be to not have too great expectations of money saving, and the wisest way to roll out this innovative tech may be to carefully choose the tools you’re using so that they’re actually applicable to your needs, and also educate your workers on the best way to use them efficiently.

    The other thing to think about is the messaging on AI deployments is still evolving. If, like Amazon, you make public-facing statements about the benefits that AI is bringing to your business, choose your words carefully — they may backfire, and imply that your business was bloated and inefficient, whether or not the news is accompanied by notice that you’re laying people off.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

    Kit Eaton

    Source link

  • Laid-off Meta workers may have future in FinAi

    Technology companies and financial institutions are open to hiring some of the 600 AI unit employees laid off by Meta last month.   AI-native feedback intelligence platform Pulse and financial services giant JPMorgan Chase are both hiring. Pulse co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ritvik Pandey took to LinkedIn to say, “For those impacted by the […]

    Whitney McDonald

    Source link

  • How Companies Are Turning No-Hire, More-Fire Into a Growth Strategy

    Job creation by U.S. companies has nearly flatlined since last spring, with most employers only hiring to replace departing staff members, or leaving those positions vacant. The bad news for people looking for work is that this trend may be gaining momentum as many businesses decide they can continue growing while either maintaining or cutting current headcounts.

    That thinking contrasts the conventional wisdom often cited to explain why hiring rates have fallen to a measly monthly average of 26,750 new jobs filled since May. Many analysts said that hesitation to recruit was based in large part on uncertainties employers faced about future economic growth. Other experts pointed to the still evolving effects that import tariffs, mass deportations, and relatively robust inflation are having on businesses.

    Another reason cited was the spreading effort by companies in adopting artificial intelligence(AI) to automate tasks that many employees previously performed. That move has provoked thousands of layoffs, while also fully taking over many entry-level positions that younger job seekers have habitually relied on.

    But while all those factors may be shaping the wider business community’s current aversion to hiring, other evidence suggests some companies recently made indefinitely freezing or decreasing their headcounts a central growth strategy.

    “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth Galetti, Amazon senior vice president of people, experience, and technology wrote in a staff memo Tuesday announcing “an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.”

    Similarly, on Tuesday UPS said it has already cut 48,000 jobs in 2025 alone in an effort to improve productivity. Other companies have also adopted the tactic.

    “By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, said in a memo obtained by Business Insider that announced last week’s 600 job cuts at the company’s Superintelligence Labs division.

    ‘Preemptively hold the line’

    Both Wang and Galetti noted their dramatic cuts would be followed by the creation of future, presumably far fewer jobs. But a recent Wall Street Journal report offered evidence that the trend to continually reduce net staffing levels is spreading across big U.S. businesses.

    The paper quoted a JPMorgan Chase executive’s observation that the bank now has a “very strong bias against” reflexively hiring people for needs it might fulfill otherwise. It also noted Goldman Sach’s stated intention to “constrain head count growth through the end of the year,” and Walmart’s similar objective of keeping overall staffing flat.

    In many cases it examined, the Journal said the increased use and performance of AI are allowing businesses to continue growing, innovating, and serving customers with fewer employees than previously required.

    “If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people,” Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky told the paper, saying he plans to keep headcount stable at around 7,000 employees over the next year. “I see a lot of companies preemptively holding the line, forecasting, and hoping that they can have smaller workforces.”

    Yet there are also signs that in addition to hedging against economic uncertainties and reaping the efficiencies provided by AI, there may be another calculation in the current moves to freeze or cut staffing levels. That thinking may internalize the habitual approval of Wall Street investors to layoff announcements, as companies move to reduce their salary bases, increase efficiencies, and boost their bottom lines.

    “(H)istorically, if someone leaves, if Jane Doe leaves, I’ve got to backfill Jane,” Intuit chief financial officer Sandeep Aujla told the Journal. To weaken that that reflex, Aujla said, company managers are required to make convincing arguments for replacing departing employees to get approval, with new hiring now viewed as a last resort.

    As a result, Aujla said, both layoffs and voluntary quits encourage managers to ask, “Is there an opportunity for us to rethink how we staff?”

    ‘Companies do not want to hire’

    A similar reflection process in the opposite direction is now underway across social media platforms. A growing number of users are posting their beliefs that even companies that advertise job openings no longer have any intention of actually filling them.

    Whether commentators attribute that to continual downsizing strategies, AI as an opportunity for replacing employees, or the economic uncertainty that has reduced hiring levels since May, many online commentators now suspect the entire employment and recruitment process is broken, or even rigged.

    “Companies do not want to hire new employees,” posted JackReaper333 on a recent Reddit thread. “They want their current employees to (a) produce more and (b) do the work of any other employees that quit… Companies will only hire new employees when they are forced to do so, that is to say, things have gotten so bad that even the higher-ups have to finally admit that their current employees cannot produce anymore.”

    Some redditors sharing that view also interpret the abundance of job openings overlapping with flat or shrinking hiring rates as reflecting an ulterior motive behind recruitment notices. One thread claimed employers who are advertising opportunities, or even interviewing candidates, “are prospecting, not hiring.”

    “I have seen first hand, companies will just prospect without actually hiring anyone,” wrote thread initiator pastelpaintbrush. “They will post job listings, do interviews, and never hire. They just want to see what’s in the job pool.”

    Another redditor offered an alternative analysis that factors in the the increasing use of AI to automate the scanning and analysis of job applications.

    “They want to data mine our resumes and show their investors that they are ‘growing,’” said Feisty-Problem516. “Making job postings is a win-win. There is no intent to hire.”

    While those allegations are clearly too broad to apply to many, perhaps even most businesses recruiting people, they do reflect darkening public opinions about the health of the U.S. employment market. Those dim views aren’t likely to improve after redditors get a look at the Journal’s report quoting business leaders’ no-hire strategies seeming to confirm their fears.

    Bruce Crumley

    Source link

  • Small Businesses Aren’t Seeing the Same AI Gains as Big Corporations. Here’s Why

    Companies of all sizes and sectors are moving swiftly to boost productivity by integrating artificial intelligence applications to automate tasks previously performed by employees. But recent reports clash significantly in calculating AI’s effects on humans, while also diverging on whether larger corporations seem to benefit from AI more than smaller businesses.

    In the end, the difference in those analyses appears to be opinions about how fast and far AI should go in replacing humans in a given workplace, and how beneficial machines taking over from employees is to the results sought in using the tech.

    The first of those inquiries came from Wells Fargo chief equity strategist Ohsung Kwon, who compared changes in revenue generated per each worker on the staffs of big S&P 500 firms. He then made the same calculation for companies on the small-cap Russell 2000 index.

    Using the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI bot as the starting point, Kwon’s team determined that the increased scaling abilities of larger corporations allowed them to benefit from the tech’s automating capabilities to boost the output—and with it, revenue—of workers they employed. During the same period, by contrast, it found productivity in the modest-size businesses fell.

    ″While productivity for the S&P 500 has soared 5.5 [percent] since ChatGPT, it’s down 12.3 [percent] for the Russell 2000,” Kwon wrote in a recent note to clients that was featured in a CNBC report on the differing results of AI adoption in business. “We see other examples of diverging trends in consumer, industrial, and financial markets.”

    But much like today’s big news that Amazon is laying off 14,000 corporate employees as it expands its use of AI across the business, Kwon’s measurement of productivity gains appears to depend mainly on human workers losing their jobs to the tech. Even if overall output remains the same or even dips following tech-driven head count reductions, the lower number of total workers—and payroll savings added back into the bottom line—mechanically boosts per employee claims of revenue generated.

    In addition to Amazon, the CNBC report lists big companies—including Meta, UPS, Starbucks, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google—that have announced big staff cuts this year. Those were undertaken to streamline their structures, but primarily to make way for use of AI to automate many of the tasks eliminated that employees previously performed.

    That willingness of big companies to sacrifice employees, cut labor costs, and boost revenue by scaling their use of AI appears to explain why they’ve benefited more from the tech than small-business owners under Kwon’s analysis. After all, even entrepreneurs responsive to investor demands for increasing returns tend to be more hesitant about laying off people they’re often working in close contact with than corporate managers.

    Any aversion to company founders cutting staff as an integral part of AI adoption may well also explain another of Kwon’s findings. While the S&P 500 rose 74 percent since use of AI took off in 2022, the Russell 2000 increased by just 39 percent—probably reflecting investor views about where the biggest, fastest potential boosts to share prices are.

    Still, none of that means smaller companies are holding back on introducing the tech to their workplaces or missing out on the productivity gains it can offer.

    A recent survey of small-business owners in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K. by Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Insights found nearly 70 percent of respondents used AI on a daily basis, with 75 percent reporting increased productivity as a result. Around 15 percent of participants said adoption of the tech had allowed them to create jobs, with only 5 percent saying they’d cut head counts instead.

    Results of a recent study by business consultancy Deloitte also measured successful adoption of AI in ways other than merely reducing head counts and costs. Its Humans x Machines report argues that both big corporations and small businesses that focus primarily on the tech rather than the employees who use it end up with disappointing results.

    Its survey found that nearly 60 percent of responding companies that deployed AI first and asked workplace questions about its use and effectiveness later are 1.6 times more likely to report lower return on their investment than other businesses.

    Companies with the best outcomes, the report said, are organizations that allowed human relations and other managers to work with staff to identify the most useful kinds of AI applications, train workers to adopt them, and then encourage continued deployment of those tools across the business. The report concluded that the tech will never meet its effectiveness potential unless business leaders prepare employees to enable that beforehand.

    “[M]ost organizations are investing heavily in AI, but not enough in the work design needed to unlock its value,” said Deloitte U.S. human capital head of research and chief futurist David Mallon in comments about the study. “This shouldn’t be an ‘either/or’ approach—it should be a ‘both/and’ strategy to maximize value. Organizations that take a technology-first approach struggle to scale, while those that intentionally design roles, workflows, and decision-making to integrate humans and machines are more likely to exceed their ROI expectations.”

    Bruce Crumley

    Source link

  • Amazon CEO Now Says AI Is Not Responsible for Recent Layoffs

    Amazon just posted its third-quarter earnings and it turns out it was a phenomenal quarter for the e-commerce giant, despite recent layoffs.

    The company giant raked in $180.2 billion in sales in the three months ending Sept. 30, up 13% from the same period last year. Its cloud business, AWS, reported its largest year-over-year growth since 2022, climbing 20% to $33 billion. The company’s stock even popped 13% in after-hours trading following the report.

    So why, with the company performing so well, did Amazon just slash 14,000 corporate jobs and hinted that more cuts could be on the way?

    Fortunately for us, CEO Andy Jassy was asked to comment on the layoffs during the company’s earnings call Thursday evening. However, he was quick to downplay any connection to AI.

    “What I would tell you is, you know, the announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI driven, not right now at least,” Jassy told investors. “It’s culture.”

    He went on to try to make the case that the company’s rapid growth over the last several years added more people, layers, and complexity to its operations. This quick growth, in turn, slowed decision-making and weakened ownership for workers at the frontlines.

    Jassy said Amazon is now committed to operating like the world’s largest startup in order to move more quickly during what he called the major “technology transformation happening right now.”

    The memo sent to laid-off employees earlier this week hit a lot of the same points Jassy made. But it also directly named the big tech shift, AI, that he had been hinting at, even as he claimed it wasn’t driving this round of layoffs.

    “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” wrote Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, in the memo.

    Still, these job cuts also come as Amazon, and the rest of Silicon Valley, is seemingly betting it all on AI.

    Jassy said on Thursday that the company’s AI and cloud infrastructure added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power capacity in the past 12 months and is expected to add another gigawatt this fourth quarter.

    And future cuts may not be limited to corporate workers. The New York Times reported last week that Amazon’s automation team expects that by 2027, the company could avoid hiring more than 160,000 U.S. workers it would normally need. Overall, Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of the company’s operations, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

    Bruce Gil

    Source link

  • Mannington shuts McAdenville yarn plant in Gaston County NC

    A flooring manufacturer is shutting down its Gaston County factory, laying off almost 300 employees right after Christmas.

    New Jersey-based Mannington Mill is closing its McAdenville plant on Dec. 27, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) filed recently with the North Carolina Department of Commerce. All 296 employees will be laid off permanently.

    The site was the former Pharr plant, a McAdenville-based yarn manufacturer, which started in 1939. Pharr left the yarn business in 2020, selling the company to Mannington Mill.

    Pharr also sold a portion of its company to the London-based Coats Group, which also laid off 41 employees at its McAdenville facility in 2023.

    Mannington manufactures flooring product such as hardwood, laminate and vinyl for residential and commercial uses. It also produced residential carpeting, until now.

    The closure is part of Mannington’s move to exit the residential carpet business due to decline in demand and unfavorable market conditions, according to a LinkedIn post.

    “The continued consumer shift to resilient flooring has forced us to reevaluate residential carpet in our portfolio,” Mannington CEO Tom Pendley said in the post. “This has led us to make the difficult decision to exit residential carpet.”

    The company will focus on its residential hard surface options.

    The McAdenville facility is one of three that will be closing. The others are located in Dalton and Chatsworth, Georgia. More than 200 people will also be laid off at those facilities.

    The company is still taking carpet orders until Dec. 1, according to its website. It will also continue to honor its warranties.

    McAdenville is going to be hit with nearly 300 layoffs at a local mill right after Christmas.
    McAdenville is going to be hit with nearly 300 layoffs at a local mill right after Christmas. Town of McAdenville

    About Mannington Mill

    The floor manufacturer opened in 1915 in Salem, New Jersey. In 2020, Mannington entered the residential carpet industry, purchasing Pharr Fibers and Yarns in McAdenville and Phenix Flooring in Dalton. Two years later, it bought Georgia Carpet Finishers in Chatsworth.

    All three facilities will be closed by 2026.

    Mannington will still produce carpets for commercial properties. Yarn processing operations in McAdenville will be transitioned to Mannington’s site in Calhoun, Georgia.

    Mannington may fill open roles at that facilities with the laid-off employees. It’s unclear if that will include the McAdenville workers.

    Related Stories from Charlotte Observer

    Desiree Mathurin

    The Charlotte Observer

    Desiree Mathurin covers growth and development for The Charlotte Observer. The native New Yorker returned to the East Coast after covering neighborhood news in Denver at Denverite and Colorado Public Radio. She’s also reported on high school sports at Newsday and southern-regional news for AP. Desiree is exploring Charlotte and the Carolinas, and is looking forward to taking readers along for the ride. Send tips and coffee shop recommendations.

    Desiree Mathurin

    Source link

  • Meta, Google, and Microsoft Triple Down on AI Spending

    While Microsoft didn’t offer a specific forecast for its AI capital expenditures for the next quarter or coming year, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, said that the company’s total spend will “increase sequentially, and we now expect the fiscal year 2026 growth rate to be higher than fiscal year 2025.”

    Tech companies are making these ambitious plans for more capital spending under the assumption that demand for AI will only continue to grow. But some analysts are raising concerns that the AI market is a bubble and will eventually burst.

    Those worries are being fueled by announcements about enormously expensive, multi-year data center projects and staggered investments. Last month, Nvidia said it would invest “up to $100 billion” in OpenAI, provided that the ChatGPT maker builds and deploys at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using Nvidia’s chips. OpenAI, meanwhile, said just yesterday that it was planning to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources worth $1.4 trillion.

    Microsoft has committed to putting a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, and it continues to use the company’s frontier AI models, but took a $3.1 billion hit in net income this quarter due to losses from that investment. Microsoft said that the ongoing nature of its partnership with OpenAI will result in increased volatility. Going forward, Hood said, the company will exclude any impacts from its OpenAI investment in its financial outlooks.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts there are two “critical” things to consider about how the company views its capital expenditures. The first is that it is finding ways to make its fleet of data centers “fungible,” or interchangeable, meaning they can be easily modified to meet changing customer demands in the future. The second is that the company is expecting to continually modernize its infrastructure.

    “It’s not like we buy one version of Nvidia and load up for all the gigawatts we have. Each year, you buy, you ride Moore’s Law, you continually modernize and depreciate it, and you use software to grow efficiency,” Nadella said.

    Mark Moerdler, a senior research analyst covering global software at Bernstein, says that Microsoft is “building capacity in tranches over time and can shift resources, which gives them a lot of protection.” But, he added, “Is there an overall AI bubble? [It’s] possible, and that they did not answer.”

    Lauren Goode, Will Knight

    Source link

  • Paramount Layoffs Hit Motion Picture Execs In Production, Marketing, Music & More; Studio Co-Chairs Say, “Today Has Been A Difficult One”

    EXCLUSIVE: Paramount‘s motion picture divisions, including production, literary, marketing and music, were impacted today with many Melrose Ave lot vets exiting. The new David Ellison run conglom is handing out approximately 1,000 pink-slips as it looks to achieve $2 billion in overall savings. We understand that some of those savings aren’t in job cuts alone.

    Among those departing, we hear, are President of Worldwide Music, Randy Spendlove who has been at the studio since 2006. Spendlove arrived to Paramount as a Grammy Winner for Best Soundtrack Album for the Miramax Best Picture Oscar winner, Chicago. He started at A&M Records as VP of Promotions where he worked with Janet Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Soundgarden and Bryan Adams. In 1998, he became President of Motion Picture Music at Miramax Films where he worked on Chicago, Shakespeare in Love, Cold Mountain and Finding Neverland. While at Paramount, he co-supervised the music and co-produced the soundtrack album for Dreamgirls, which was nominated for three Best Song Oscars.

    Other executive departures include Bryan Oh, SVP of Production, who most recently was shepherding a K-pop music drama starring Ji-young Yoo and singer-songwriter Eric Nam; Geoff Stier, EVP of Production who was formerly with Showtime Original Programming and a previous Paramount vet overseeing such titles as World War Z and True Grit before coming back in July 2024; Andres Alvarez, EVP of Home Entertainment; Rachel Cadden, EVP of International Theatrical Marketing; Christine Benitez, SVP Multicultural Marketing; and Phil Cohen, SVP of Literary Affairs who arrived to the studio in 2022.

    In a note to staff today, Paramount Co-Chairs Dana Golberg and Josh Greenstein took a knee, expressing how “difficult” today is and how “we want to take a moment to acknowledge the departure of valued colleagues and express our deep gratitude for their contributions, dedication, and the impact they’ve made on our studio.” The duo also emphasized the new Skydance-owned Paramount’s plan of “right-sizing our organization” which aims to “refocus our energy, and align our efforts with the endless opportunities ahead.”

    There are 1,000 more expected to be cut from the roughly 20,000-employee count of the combined Paramount and Skydance. The next wave is hitting offshore offices. As Deadline previously reported, Paramount television and marketing/distribution were effected today.

    Below is the internal email from Paramount Co-Chairs Dana Golberg and Josh Greenstein.

    Team,

    We recognize that today has been a difficult one as our workforce changes take effect. We want to take a moment to acknowledge the departure of valued colleagues and express our deep gratitude for their contributions, dedication, and the impact they’ve made on our studio.

    This restructuring marks a pivotal step in shaping the path forward. We’re right-sizing our organization to ensure Paramount Pictures remains not only the iconic studio built on more than a century of storytelling, but also the leading destination for creators and innovators who will define the future of entertainment. Please know that we’re making these changes as comprehensively as possible to ensure we can move forward decisively, refocus our energy, and align our efforts with the endless opportunities ahead.

    As we set our sights on the future, our goal is to create clarity and momentum as we begin this next chapter. Your managers and HR business partners are here to support you—please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns. What makes this place exceptional is the spirit of collaboration and kindness you show one another every day. We know that same generosity will carry us through this transition.

    We will be sharing more around our strategy and structure in the coming weeks and appreciate your continued commitment and focus. 

    Thank you for everything you bring to this team. We’re confident that, together, we’ll build an even stronger future.

    Dana and Josh

    Anthonypauldalessandro

    Source link