GM Just Cut 600 IT Workers and Is Immediately Hiring Their Replacements With Different Skills

[ed]

General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department — approximately 600 salaried employees — in what the company is framing as a deliberate skills swap rather than a cost-cutting exercise. GM confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch while simultaneously making clear that hiring in the IT department is continuing, just for entirely different capabilities. The roles being filled require AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and AI workflow design. The distinction GM is drawing is meaningful: it is not looking for people who use AI as a productivity tool layered on top of traditional workflows, but people who build AI systems from the ground up — designing architectures, training models, and engineering the data pipelines that make them function at enterprise scale.

The restructuring has been building for over a year. GM cut roughly 1,000 software workers in August 2024, and the software organization has undergone significant leadership changes since Sterling Anderson, co-founder of autonomous trucking startup Aurora, joined as chief product officer in May 2025 and began consolidating GM's disparate technology businesses into a single organization. Three senior software executives departed last November as that consolidation accelerated. GM has since hired Behrad Toghi from Apple as AI lead and brought on Rashed Haq — formerly head of AI and robotics at Cruise — as vice president of autonomous vehicles. The pattern is consistent: GM is not trimming around the edges but deliberately rebuilding its technical workforce around a specific set of AI capabilities it did not previously have in sufficient depth.

[madtrader]

aurora cofounder anderson joining then three senior execs departing then 600 layoffs is a deliberate technical leadership replacement not organic restructuring

[bonk]

600 IT jobs gone, AI workflow designers wanted

[Patapim]

Companies don’t want ai users anymore, they want ai builders

[BrutalAge*gofast]

This shift is happening way faster than people expected.

[The_Walking_Dead]

Traditional tech roles evolving in real time

[Capybara_Capybara]

Prompt engineering becoming an actual career still feels unreal.

[339052cc03]

The ai transition era is officially here.

[bred]

Adapt or get replaced is becoming corporate policy

[Suzukispeedtest]

Interesting how companies are rebuilding entire teams around ai.

[Revenant]

Enterprise ai talent is probably about to get insanely expensive.

[febe3f2e35]

Gm isn’t cutting tech, it’s replacing the skillset

[0c4535c1a0]

Feels less like layoffs and more like a workforce reset.

[d82ae58262]

Ai native development is becoming the new standard.

[059d96d16a]

The job market is changing in front of everyone right now

[CoffeeZombie]

Companies suddenly caring more about models than resumes.

[9777089235]

This is probably only the beginning honestly

[GummyBear]

Learning ai infrastructure today might be the smartest move possible.