People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help reduce their workforce. Tornittina plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Karen last year he warned that, in 18 months, his company could cut 20% of its workforce thanks to artificial intelligence, a small round of layoffs today confirms.
TechCrunch has learned that Turnitin laid off about 15 people earlier this year as part of broader organizational changes. While that’s nowhere near the 20% cut Caren predicted — Turnitin has over 900 employees, per LinkedIn and Pitchbook data — is a set of redundancies that we are particularly interested in, given Caren’s earlier comments.
Speaking at an event in 2023, noted that Turnitin had a few hundred engineers, but believed that in 18 months, “we’ll need 20% of that number of people,” referring to the engineering staff. “And we’ll be able to start hiring a lot of them out of high school compared to four-year colleges — probably the same for sales and marketing functions,” he added. His comments came during a discussion on how artificial intelligence will affect the labor market by increasing efficiency.
Turnitin’s software leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect whether a student’s writing is plagiarized. It sells to schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions and works with partners like Coursera, Blackboard and others.
Already, there is some evidence that artificial intelligence is replacing workers. Klarna recently announced this Its AI Assistant can do the work of 700 workers, shaking up the industry. (Klarna later clarified that the customer service workers the AI was replacing were hired by outsourcing companies, not direct employees.)
Turnitin confirmed the layoffs in a statement to TechCrunch, but not the number of employees:
“After careful consideration, late last year we communicated to our global team our decision to make organizational changes to evolve our business strategy, streamline processes, strengthen our customer focus and support our continued growth. Turnitin. In gratitude for their contribution, Turnitin provided transitional support to affected team members. Out of respect for their privacy, we decline to comment further on this internal matter.”
