Google has laid off more than 100 employees in its cloud design unit, the latest in a string of cuts that show how the tech industry’s restructuring around artificial intelligence continues to reshape workforces.
Internal documents seen by CNBC revealed that the roles eliminated include teams focused on “quantitative user experience research” and “platform and service experience,” as well as adjacent groups. These jobs — which often relied on user data and behavioral studies to guide product design — have been halved in some cases. Many of the affected employees, most of them based in the United States, were told they have until early December to find another role within the company.
This week’s reductions are part of a long-running trend. Google has been steadily scaling back across multiple divisions since the beginning of the year, offering voluntary exit packages and slashing more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams. The company has also extended buyouts across human resources, hardware, search, ads, marketing, finance, and commerce, while pressing employees to use AI more directly in their daily work.
The restructuring reflects a deeper shift at the company. Google has pivoted aggressively toward building AI infrastructure, with CEO Sundar Pichai warning in August that the company must “be more efficient as we scale up so we don’t solve everything with headcount.” In practice, that has meant cutting people-focused roles like design and research in favor of the raw engineering capacity required to support AI models and supercomputing.
A History of Cuts
Google’s workforce has already been through several waves of layoffs in recent years. In January 2023, the company eliminated about 12,000 jobs — roughly 6% of its global workforce — in one of its largest rounds of cuts ever. That move followed slower advertising revenue growth and mounting costs as the company prepared for an AI arms race sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Later that same year, further reductions were made across recruiting and other non-technical divisions.
Other tech giants have followed similar patterns. Microsoft cut about 10,000 workers in early 2023 and announced another 9,000 in July 2025, with the company acknowledging that resources were being funneled into cloud and AI services. Meta launched what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called its “year of efficiency” in 2023, eliminating more than 20,000 roles and flattening its management structure, only to continue trimming teams as it shifted more investment into generative AI and immersive platforms. Amazon, too, has cut tens of thousands of jobs since late 2022, hitting its retail, devices, and cloud divisions.
No End in Sight
What is increasingly clear is that these job cuts are not temporary corrections but part of a structural transformation in Big Tech. As AI systems grow more capable, many roles tied to design, support, and even middle management are being sidelined. Analysts believe this trend will accelerate rather than slow down, as companies trade traditional headcount for the data centers, chips, and algorithmic research needed to stay ahead in the AI race.
It is believed that every new leap in AI makes more categories of work redundant. Thus, if Google and its peers can get better results through AI-driven processes and infrastructure, there’s little incentive to keep large teams doing the old work.
Against this backdrop, the message for employees across Silicon Valley is that the more AI improves, the more human workers risk being cut.
