Oracle announced on Monday that it has cut 21,000 jobs over the past year, a decrease of 13%, with a significant portion of the reductions attributed to roles impacted by AI. The company revealed in its annual financial filing that the integration of AI technologies has led to, and may continue to lead to, workforce reductions.
This disclosure highlights a growing trend within the tech industry: companies are seeing record profits while simultaneously reducing their staff, often citing AI as both a driver of growth and a reason for layoffs. According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tech layoffs reached their highest level in years in May, with AI frequently mentioned as the cause.
In previous discussions, we’ve explored why this justification for layoffs might need re-evaluation, especially since many of these roles were added during the pandemic hiring boom, prompting questions about the underlying reasons. Below is a detailed account, in reverse chronological order, of major tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year, citing AI as a factor.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. Recently, GitLab has laid off around 350 employees, representing 14% of its workforce, to allocate funds for AI infrastructure and manage increased traffic from AI processes. CEO Bill Staples noted that agentic workloads are challenging competitors and that the company is undergoing a fundamental rebuild of its core infrastructure to meet anticipated growth. GitLab is withdrawing from 22 countries, reducing management layers, and collaborating with an unidentified AI lab to revamp its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company’s first-quarter revenue was $264 million, a 23% increase from the previous year, with expected restructuring costs between $30 and $35 million.
Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has been discreetly reducing its workforce within its Cloud division, including the Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-related cybersecurity personnel, despite significant Cloud revenue growth of 63%, surpassing $20 billion for the first time, and a near doubling of its backlog to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has decreased more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams, resulting in 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike other companies, Google has not disclosed a total number for the layoffs, which have occurred through ongoing performance reviews, voluntary buyouts, and structural changes, with estimates ranging from 1,500 to over 3,000 engineers.
Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit is planning to cut about 3,000 jobs, or 17% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring that focuses on reducing complexity and reallocating resources towards AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly informed employees that the company aims to simplify its structure to enhance product delivery.
Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta has laid off approximately 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, while transitioning 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles, which have reportedly been met with dissatisfaction. Zuckerberg explained to employees that the layoffs were essential because “success isn’t a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced the reduction of nearly 4,000 positions, accounting for 5% of its workforce, despite reporting strong profit and revenue figures. CFO Mark Patterson noted that the restructuring was not primarily about cost savings but rather about reallocating resources around silicon, optics, security, and AI.
Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare reduced its workforce by 20%, or 1,100 employees, while reporting its highest quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, a 34% increase year-over-year. CEO Matthew Prince stated that the majority of those laid off were in roles such as middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.
General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM cut 500 to 600 jobs, primarily in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, citing a reassessment of workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A source familiar with the situation told CNBC that AI was a factor in the decision, though not the sole reason. GM’s statement indicated a transformation of its Information Technology organization to better position the company for future challenges. Despite the reductions, GM still had around 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange announced a reduction of around 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring to address market volatility and boost AI efficiency. The company streamlined its organizational structure to five layers beneath the CEO and COO and plans to experiment with “one-person teams” that combine engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong noted that AI has dramatically accelerated work processes — enabling engineers to complete tasks in days that previously took weeks — necessitating the integration of AI across all job functions.
PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal revealed plans to cut approximately 20% of its workforce over two to three years, totaling over 4,500 jobs, as part of a strategy focused on AI adoption and streamlining operations. CEO Enrique Lores informed investors of the company’s aggressive AI adoption in development processes, with a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, responsible for redesigning the company’s processes on a function-by-function basis. Lores described the layoffs as an effort to eliminate organizational layers, with AI extending beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.
Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without specifying the number of affected employees. CFO Amy Hood mentioned that the total headcount decreased year-over-year in fiscal Q3, with expectations of continued declines as the company focuses on creating high-performing teams that operate with speed and agility amid rising AI investments.
Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap reduced its global workforce by roughly 16%, or about 1,000 full-time employees, and closed more than 300 open positions. CEO Evan Spiegel attributed the layoffs to rapid advancements in AI, which enable teams to reduce repetitive tasks, increase speed, and better support the community, partners, and advertisers. Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC that AI tools have already driven progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 reductions and April 2026 Red Hat engineering cuts, estimates suggest between 3,000 and 9,000 U.S. positions were eliminated, raising IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 to over 15,000. Bloomberg reported that IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as about 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting a low single-digit percentage of its global workforce.
Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut around 1,600 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, to realign towards AI and enterprise sales. Shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes stated: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”
Dell — Jan 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s workforce decreased by about 10% in fiscal 2026, equivalent to around 11,000 jobs, bringing the total number of employees to 97,000 from 108,000 the previous year, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected that its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As previously mentioned, Oracle began notifying employees of impending job cuts via terminal emails. The reductions occurred despite Oracle reporting a $3.7 billion quarterly net income, a 27% increase year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations surging 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. These cuts eventually totaled 21,000 over 12 months, as revealed in Oracle’s June 22 annual filing.
Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block reduced its workforce by 4,000 jobs — nearly half its staff, bringing the total to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier reduction of about 4,000 customer-support roles, reducing the team from around 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff stating the company required “fewer heads” as AI agents handle the work.
Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — approximately 9% of its corporate workforce over three months. The company stated that these measures were part of efforts to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had previously mentioned in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
