General Motors has laid off around 600 employees, which comes to around 10% of its IT department. According to TechCrunch, this is a deliberate skill swap with the company removing workers whose expertise no longer fits and making room for some with AI-focused backgrounds.
In a statement, the company said, “GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.”
A person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring people for roles in its IT department, but for different skills. The most sought-after capabilities are AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows.
GM seems to be looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up, designing systems, training models, and engineering pipelines, not just those who know how to use AI as a productivity tool.
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Over the past 18 months, GM fired several employees, in different departments. In August 2024, for example, the company cut about 1,000 software workers.
There has been a significant change in the company’s software workforce since Sterling Anderson was hired as the chief product officer in May 2025. Last November, three top executives left the company’s software team as Anderson pushed to consolidate GM’s disparate technology businesses into one organization. Since then, GM filled the gap with new, AI-focused hires, including Behrad Toghi, who previously worked at Apple as AI lead. The company also hired Rashed Haq — who spent five years at self-driving vehicle company Cruise as AI head — as its vice president of autonomous vehicles.
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Anderson said the auto industry “has been taking a lashing” because of tariffs, low-cost Chinese vehicles and now “the cost pressures that consumers are facing all across the board, making their discretionary purchase of automobiles a harder sell.”
“Artificial intelligence and, in particular, the tremendous growth of coding agents, is probably also a factor,” he said. The most recent round of job cuts is part of a continuing trend inside the automaker to both staff to meet market demand and to match tech skills to tech needs of the future.
This comes as widespread layoffs continue to affect different sectors. According to reports, layoffs influenced more than 37,000 employees in the first 10 days of May 2026, as companies across technology, finance, aviation, media, and cybersecurity announced major workforce reductions amid restructuring and the growing adoption of artificial intelligence.