General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees — in a deliberate skills swap: weeding out workers whose expertise no longer fits and making room for some with backgrounds focused on artificial intelligence.
GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it had made layoffs. they were first was mentioned from Bloomberg News.
In an emailed statement, the automaker framed the layoffs as a way to prepare it for the future, without elaborating. “GM is transforming its IT organization to better position the company for the future,” the company said.
These layoffs are not all permanent staff reductions. A person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring for roles in its IT division, but for different skills. The most sought-after capabilities are native AI development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering and agent and model development, direct engineering, and new AI workflows. Practically speaking, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models and designing the pipelines — not just using AI as a productivity tool.
GM has laid off employees in various departments over the past 18 months as it focuses its resources on high-priority initiatives, including artificial intelligence. In August 2024, for example, the company cut about 1,000 software workers.
The software workforce has undergone significant changes since Sterling Anderson — co-founder of self-driving truck startup Aurora and a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry — was hired in May 2025 as Chief Product Officer. Last November, three top executives left the company’s software team as Anderson pushed to consolidate GM’s disparate technology businesses into one organization: Baris Cetinok, senior vice president of software product management and services; Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering; and Barak Turovsky, a former Cisco vice president who spent just nine months as GM’s AI chief.
GM has since moved to fill the void with new AI-focused hires. It hired Behrad Toghi, who previously worked at Apple, in October as its head of artificial intelligence. The company also brought on Rashed Haq as vice president of autonomous vehicles. Haq spent five years at Cruise — the autonomous vehicle company that was acquired and later closed by GM — as head of artificial intelligence and robotics.
For the industry, GM’s restructuring is a signal of what business AI adoption looks like in practice — not just adding AI tools on top of existing teams, but deliberately rebuilding the workforce from the ground up. The specific capabilities it’s hiring for — agent development, model engineering, native AI workflows — point directly to where enterprise demand is headed.
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