Google CEO Sundar Pichai says company slashed manager roles by 10%

Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly said he has slashed a tenth of the search giant’s managerial roles since last year as part of a drive to become more efficient.

In total, Google has reduced the number of managers, directors, and vice presidents within its workforce by 10%, Pichai said during an all-hands meeting on Wednesday.

A Google spokesperson said the structural changes described by Pichai are designed have been rolling out since 2023 and did not represent job cuts beyond those previously reported.

Some managers were shifted to individual contributor roles – meaning they are no longer responsible for other employees.

An unspecified number of other managers were laid off, the spokesperson added.

Insider was first to report on Pichai’s remarks. Shares of Google parent Alphabet were flat in Friday trading.

Pichai had previously identified “durable cost savings” as one of Google’s key goals for 2024.

This year alone, Google has slashes hundreds of jobs across multiple divisions, including its ad sales team, its core engineering team and the hardware division responsible for devices such as the Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.

The biggest round of cuts occurred in 2023, when Google cut some 12,000 employees in a major bloodletting.

The restructuring has played out as Google attempts to compete with Sam Altman’s OpenAI and other burgeoning rivals in the artificial intelligence sector.

Google is also in the midst of several high-profile legal battles that could upend its business model – including a looming breakup of its search business after a federal judge ruled it was a “monopolist” last August.

Google is just one of many Big Tech giants that have slashed their workforces in recent months due to tightened economic conditions and a desire to shift more resources toward the artificial intelligence race.

Mark Zuckerberg famously declared 2023 to be a “year of efficiency” at Meta while slashing tens of thousands of jobs at the Facebook and Instagram parent.

Meta’s middle managers were reportedly told to shift to individual contributor roles or leave as part of what was reportedly described internally as “flattening.”