IBM on Tuesday told its employees that it is slashing the size of its staff, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Slashing of jobs will take place in the company’s marketing and communications divisions.
In a roughly seven-minute meeting with staffers in the unit, Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s chief communications officer made the announcement, said the person, reported the CNBC.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC in December that the company was “massively upskilling all of our employees on AI”. In August, it announced a plan to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI. In January of last year, IBM said on its earnings call that it was cutting 3,900 positions.
“In 4Q earnings earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single-digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with,” the company told CNBC in a statement.
50,000 jobs gone!
According to the website Layoffs.fyi, so far in 2024, some 204 tech companies have cut almost 50,000 jobs. For layoffs, January was the busiest month as Amazon, Alphabet, and Unity all announced job cuts.
IBM has returned to growth, but expansion remains muted. Revenue in the fourth quarter increased 4 per cent from a year earlier even as earnings topped estimates. On the earnings call, CFO James Kavanaugh spoke of workforce rebalancing.
The company has been trying to fit into the emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) narrative. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has been a big story across tech.