Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” initiative for 2023 has paid off handsomely. And now Google (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai is pulling something similar that could mean more job cuts for the tech giant’s nearly 200,000 employees.
In an internal memo last week, first reported by The Verge, Pichai laid out seven goals for Google in 2024:
- Deliver the world’s most advanced, safe and responsible A.I.
- Improve knowledge, learning, creativity and productivity.
- Build the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices.
- Enable organizations and developers to innovate on Google Cloud.
- Provide the world’s most trusted products and platforms.
- Build a Google that’s extraordinary for Googlers and the world.
- Improve company velocity, efficiency and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings.
One item that stood out from this list is the last bullet point about efficiency and “durable cost savings.” At the beginning of 2023, Pichai, who is also the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet (GOOGL), announced a plan to lay off 12,000 employees, or 6 percent of the company’s workforce. Apparently that’s not enough. In the first three weeks of 2024 so far, Alphabet has already cut over 1,000 employees across various departments, including ad sales, engineering, hardware and YouTube.
“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai said in a separate internal memo on Jan. 17 . “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”
Despite cost savings, in his list of 2024 goals Pichai highlighted Google’s commitment to A.I., a central battle field for Big Tech companies. In December 2023, Google unveiled Gemini, its latest answer to OpenAI’s GPT model. The new A.I. model is supposed to encompass all of Google’s products, as the company is also launching two more advanced versions named Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra. The memo also shouts out Google Cloud, which recently introduced its offering of A.I. tools for retailers, following a similar move from Amazon last September.
