Alphabet, Google’s parent, notified in a staff memo in January to lay off 6% of its workforce or cut about 12,000 jobs.
World’s biggest economy America has been struggling with massive layoffs especially in the tech sector over the last couple of months. But now India seems to be getting affected too!
According to a report by Hindu Business Line, Google India has laid off 453 employees across various departments. The Country Head and Vice President at Google India Sanjay Gupta sent out an email to the affected employees late at night on Thursday.
However, it is still unclear if the above layoffs are a part of the 12,000 job cuts announced last month by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The company has not responded to the media organization’s request to comment.
In January, Alphabet notified in a staff memo to lay off 6% of its workforce or cut about 12,000 jobs. The Sundar Pichai-led company was prepared for “a different economic reality” and the CEO took “full responsibility” for the decisions that led to the layoffs, reports noted.
Among other cost-cutting measures, Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence firm DeepMind Technologies also reportedly announced, in January, to shut down its office in Canada’s Edmonton. DeepMind’s Edmonton office is the only international site directly managed by the AI firm and not housed within a Google-managed office. The company has offered engineers and researchers to relocate to another DeepMind office, such as in Montreal. However, employees handling organizational infrastructure roles reportedly will be laid off.
In a nutshell, a setback in consumer spending due to high inflation and the threat of a looming recession this year has pushed corporates to keep a lid on their spending. Several other tech companies like Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft, among others, have laid off thousands of employees in an attempt to gear up for a global economic slowdown.
Meanwhile, Google’s competition in the AI segment has escalated after the Microsoft-backed conversational bot ChatGPT exploded in popularity. The Sundar Pichai-led tech major Google also announced its experimental conversational artificial intelligence chatbot service, Bard, earlier this month.
However, the company suffered reputational damage and lost about $100 billion in market value due to Bard’s one mistake. In a recent turn of events, Pichai has reportedly Pichai asked Googlers to contribute two-to-four hours of their time this week to help improve Bard.
