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.