Google is laying off hundreds of workers who sell ads to big businesses

Days after laying off more than a thousand employees from Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Google Assistant and core engineering divisions, Google is cutting “hundreds of roles” on its advertising sales team, a company spokesperson told Engadget on Tuesday.

“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers,” the company said in a statement. “We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. As part of this, a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles on the team or elsewhere at Google.”

The spokesperson declined to share information about the exact number of employees impacted by the cuts or where they were located. The news was first reported by Business Insider, which obtained a memo that Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler sent staff on Tuesday.

Google’s latest cuts continue the trend of layoffs at tech companies, which shed thousands of jobs in 2023. In the first two weeks of this year, for instance Amazon cut hundreds of workers in video game streaming service Twitch, Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Audible. Discord, Meta, Unity and Duolingo have also let go employees in 2024.

In December, The Information reported that Google was planning to reorganize its ad sales unit, which has more than 30,000 people, in favor of using machine learning to help customers buy more ads on flagship products like Google Search and YouTube, which is how the company makes a bulk of its revenue. Most of the company’s cuts taking place today will focus on ad sales teams selling ads to large businesses.

Meanwhile, the company is reportedly throwing millions of dollars of stock at select researchers at DeepMind, its artificial intelligence unit, to stop them from decamping to rivals like OpenAI.