• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 20, 2023

Google plans to further consolidate staff through possible layoffs as well as reassigning employees who oversee relationships with major advertisers in its customer sales unit.

The reorganization comes as the company relies more on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to support customers in ad-buying strategies for search, YouTube and other services.

Google can help advertisers create new ads that its technology such as Performance Max suggests will perform well.

Those ads are on pace to generate tens of billions of dollars annually in revenue for the company, according to The Information, citing a person with knowledge of the situation. 

The sales unit is about a 30,000-person ad team. Sean Downey, president of Americas & Global Partners at Google, said at a department-wide meeting last week that Google plans to restructure its ad-sales teams without specifying whether the move would include layoffs, the report explained.

Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened up about the way the company managed its layoff of about 6% of its workforce -- 12,000 employees -- in 2022. He said it was not done correctly, although he defended the decision.

The admission, announced nearly a year ago, became clear in a leaked audio when someone asked at the most recent hands-on meeting “what impact did this decision have on our growth, P&L, and morale?"

Pichai said the layoffs had a "clear big impact on morale.” This was “reflected in the comments in Googlegeist,” the company’s internal survey that measures employee satisfaction on topics such as leadership, product focus, and compensation.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Google, Amazon, Snap and Zillow will announce new job cuts. The four technology companies are expected to at least cut 1,700 combined jobs. All four had previously laid off employees in the past 13 months.

Google laid off up to 20 data scientists in its voice-assistant division in a third round of cuts since September when layoffs occurred within the Google News and recruiting teams. The Waymo division last month also had a round of layoffs this year.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had 190,234 employees at the end of 2022, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By the end of June, its headcount fell to 181,798, according to its filing, which took place around September.