In seven minutes meeting, IBM announces sacking employees from two divisions

IBM has joined the tech layoff club once again this year as it announced laying off employees from its marketing and communications divisions, without mentioning the exact number.

IBM’s chief communications officer, Jonathan Adashek, announced the cut in the approximately seven-minute-long meeting with the concerned departments, CNBC report cited sources as saying.

The announcement comes mere months after IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna in December said the company will focus on “upskilling” its employees in an AI-driven business environment.

Joining the AI narrative

IBM has long been seen falling behind ever since its competitors Amazon, Google, Microsoft have stepped up efforts to compete in an artificial intelligence (AI) race.

In August, IBM announced replacement of nearly 8,000 jobs with AI, later billing a ‘development studio’ named Watson X to “train, tune, and deploy” machine-learning models.

In its earnings call in January 2023, IBM had announced that it was cutting 3,900 positions, with its CEO later declaring a hiring pause saying, “I could easily see 30 per cent of that (employee count) getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”

However, the company’s CFO James Kavanaugh said it will continue to hire for certain positions and expects the headcount to be about the same as it exits this year.

As per a report, IBM had about 288,000 employees by the end of 2023.

The tech downsizing story continues

So far this year, around 204 tech companies have cut almost 50,000 jobs, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. Major tech players like Alphabet, Amazon and Unity have all announced job cuts with January being the busiest layoff month.

The industry is still grappling with the post-pandemic adjustments during which tech hiring witnessed a boom.

The potential overhiring resulted in a rough 2023, with companies like Amazon and Meta letting go tens of thousands of their employees.

With inputs from agencies