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Google has laid off 10 percent of its administrative staff as part of a long-running campaign to increase efficiency. According to multiple reports, CEO Sundar Pichai announced during a meeting on Wednesday that the job cuts would be in the positions of directors, managers and vice presidents. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that some of the employees whose positions were eliminated "will be moved into individual employee roles, while others will eliminate their roles." The news comes on the heels of rapid developments in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). growing competitors like OpenAI. OpenAI is launching a product that industry experts say could threaten Google Search, the company's online search business that accounts for more than 57 percent of its revenue.

In response, Google introduced generative AI capabilities into its products and this month launched Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model to date. Pichai said the new model will usher in a "new era of agents" with artificial intelligence models designed to understand the world and make decisions. The announcement sent Google shares up more than 4 percent on Wall Street, a day after the announcement of its groundbreaking quantum chip, which had already sent shares up 3.5 percent.

The layoffs are the fourth this year alone, after the company cut hundreds of jobs in its global advertising team in January and another 100 in its cloud division in June. Google, owned by Alphabet, rolled out the performance upgrade in September 2022. As of January next year, the company had cut more than 12,000 jobs, or 6.4 percent of its global workforce. In an open letter to employees at the time, Pichai took "full responsibility for the decisions that got our company here" but said the company needed to accelerate the period of significant growth. He also conducted a company-wide performance audit that included a review of product areas, functions, levels and regions at Alphabet and acknowledged that the company could have handled the layoffs better.

This is difficult for every company. At Google, we haven't had a moment like this in 25 years... [but] it would have been much worse if we hadn't acted. At the same conference, Pichai also spoke about the need to change company culture and redefine what it means to be “Google.” “Google-ness” is an amorphous term that has had many meanings over the years, but is generally understood to mean “being Googled.” What Google looks for in applicants.