Embrace AI and lay off 8,000 people! Century-old giant IBM’s “Guangzhou Expansion Plan” has begun

IBM suddenly announced the launch of a new round of layoffs!

In the latest 7-minute staff meeting, IBM's chief communications officer announced the news.

This time it will mainly focus on the marketing and communications departments.

Although IBM has not issued a formal statement on the scale of layoffs, as recently as January this year, they announced the layoffs of 3,400 people.

The company’s CEO Arvind Krishna has earlier stated that the company will replace 8,000 jobs with artificial intelligence in the next five years.

This entire sudden operation has directly confused the employees...

Have these 8,000 people already started to lay off employees

△Picture source: One-third of an acre

According to statistics from relevant websites, about 204 technology companies have laid off nearly 50,000 people so far this year.

Including Google’s parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have also launched “Guangjin Plan” one after another.

IBM officially announced layoffs

Since no more specific information was revealed about this layoff, it triggered a lot of imagination among netizens.

IBM employees in Research Triangle Park are considered to be the first victims.

There was indeed an employee who had just been laid off there-senior SEO strategist Phil Buckle was interviewed. He said he was informed of the news when he met with his boss.

He emphasized that IBM was a "dream job" and that restructuring was a common business practice.

However, he also said that Research Triangle Park’s marketing team is not large, so the impact is relatively small.

About 9,000 employees worked there as of early last year, but IBM has consistently declined to confirm local employment numbers.

It is understood that IBM employees internally call the layoff plan "resource actions."

In January this year, IBM proposed "workforce rebalancing" at the financial report meeting, and It said this would only affect a "very low proportion of staff".

(What is this new concept?)

IBM spokesman Michael Cable further explained:

is the improvement of productivity Driven by "rebalancing" and our ongoing efforts to align our workforce with the skills our customers need most.

Especially in areas such as artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud.

The company expects that by the end of 2024, the number of employees will remain the same as at the beginning of the year.

In fact, IBM's layoffs have been continuing. Back in January last year, the company disclosed that 3,900 jobs would be cut.

Not long after, IBM officially announced plans to replace 8,000 jobs with AI.

In December last year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna publicly stated that the company was "massively improving the AI ​​skills of all employees."

The reduction in employee size corresponds to the decline in AI Increased investment.

In May last year, IBM announced the launch of WatsonX, which is billed as a development studio for enterprises to "train, tune and deploy" machine learning models.

However, under the siege of similar products from major manufacturers such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, the response seems to be mediocre.

According to IBM’s January earnings call, the business size of generative AI and Watsonx products has doubled from the third quarter of 2023, when the business size was only in the hundreds of millions.

The number of layoffs in major technology companies has surged

But when it comes to layoffs, this is not something IBM will do again.

In January of this year alone, approximately 23,670 employees at technology companies were laid off. Including Google, Amazon, Discord, etc. are all laying off employees.

As of now, this number has expanded to nearly 50,000 people...

Reference link:

[ 1 ] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/12/ibm-tells-employees-of-job-cuts-in-marketing-and-communications.html

[ 2 ] https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article286731530.html

[ 3 ] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/26/tech-layoffs-jump-in-january-as-alphabet-meta-microsoft-reach-high.html

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