Google is laying off hundreds of employees who sell ads to large enterprises

Following the layoff of over a thousand people from Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Google Assistant, and core engineering departments, Google is reducing “hundreds of roles“ on its advertising sales team, according to a corporate spokeswoman.

“Every year, we go through a rigorous process to structure our team so that we can provide the best service possible to our Ads customers,” the business stated. “We direct consumers to the appropriate expert teams and sales channels to suit their service requirements. As part of this, a few hundred positions worldwide are being removed, and affected workers will be able to apply for available positions on the team or elsewhere within Google.”

The representative declined to disclose the actual number of employees affected by the cutbacks or where they were based. The revelation was originally reported by Business Insider, which acquired a message delivered to Google employees on Tuesday by chief business officer Philipp Schindler.

Google’s new layoffs continue the pattern of tech giants cutting thousands of positions in 2023. For example, in the first two weeks of this year, Amazon let off hundreds of employees at video game streaming site Twitch, Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Audible. Discord, Meta, Unity, and Duolingo have also laid off staff in 2024.

In December, The Information reported that Google was planning to reorganize its ad sales unit, which employs over 30,000 people, in favor of using machine learning to help customers buy more ads on flagship products such as Google Search and YouTube, which generate most of the company’s revenue. The majority of the company’s cutbacks today will target ad sales teams that sell advertisements to large enterprises. Meanwhile, the corporation is apparently giving millions of dollars in shares to certain DeepMind researchers to keep them from defecting to competitors such as OpenAI.