Google Lays Off Employees Working On AI Assistant

Date: November 03, 2023

According to a report, nearly 20 staff members from the Artificial Intelligence development department were laid off in continuation to the earlier layoff trend.

Google joined the league of layoff giants this year with more than 12,000 employees fired in 2023 alone. Now, it has resurfaced in the limelight after an internal report was leaked about the recent layoff in the Google Assistant department. According to the report, 20 staff members have been laid off owing to a strategic change in the Artificial Intelligence development aspect of the company.

Citing the internal document, the whistleblower employee has stated that all the 20 employees fired were data scientists. Out of the 20 fired, a few employees were transferred last week from the Bard team to the Assistant team, post which they received a meeting Email about their role termination just a few hours after.

The reports also stated that one of the laid off employees was on maternity leave, and another has cancer. This puts Google in bad exposure to employer branding as the laid off employees are given 60 days to find new employment or else they would have to leave.

In order to optimize our team structures around our highest priorities, we've reorganized our team to best support our strategic business objectives,” a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying. Strategic reorganization is one of the most common reasons given by companies laying off employees in mass numbers, especially the tech giants.

The company recently fired 40 employees from its Google News division. It is quite uncanny to find a logical reason for such a big change in the structuring of the operations. These restructuring processes happen gradually and usually shift their employees to different roles that better suit the business needs.

“We’ve made some internal changes to streamline our organization. A small number of employees were impacted. We’re supporting everyone with a transition period, outplacement services and severance as they look for new opportunities at Google and beyond,” it added.

These reasons feel completely unjustified, noting the company’s huge revenue stream. Throughout the year, Google has fired hundreds of employees in each cycle and mostly kept the notice random and abrupt, without any scope of discussion or reconsideration. The employees earlier were revoked access to their employee accounts, but later Google gave an interim time period to settle down the finances and submit all account details.