GM just laid off hundreds of IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 paid employees — in a deliberate skills swap: getting rid of workers whose expertise is no longer relevant and making room for some with AI-focused backgrounds.

GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it has laid off workers. It was first reported by Bloomberg News.

In an emailed statement, the automaker framed the layoffs as a way to prepare it for the future, without providing details. “GM is transforming its IT organization to position the company for the future,” the company said.

Not all of these layoffs are permanent headcount reductions. One person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring people for roles in the IT department, but for different skills. The most popular capabilities are native AI development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, agile engineering, and new AI workflows. On the practical side, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing systems, training models, engineering pipelines — and not just using AI as a productivity tool.

GM has laid off management staff in several divisions over the past 18 months as it focuses its resources on high-priority initiatives, including artificial intelligence. In August 2024, for example, the company laid off about 1,000 software workers.

The software workforce has seen a sea change since Sterling Anderson — co-founder of self-driving trucking company Aurora and a veteran of the self-driving vehicle industry — was appointed in May 2025 as chief product officer. Last November, three top executives left the company’s software team as Anderson sought to consolidate GM’s disparate technology businesses into a single organization: Paris Cetinok, senior vice president of software product management and services, Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software engineering and services, and Barak Turovsky, a former vice president at Cisco who spent just nine months as GM’s chief AI officer.

Since then, GM has moved to fill the gap by hiring new employees focused on artificial intelligence. It hired Behrad Toghi, who previously worked at Apple, in October as AI lead. The company also appointed Rashid Haq as its vice president for autonomous vehicles. Haqq spent five years at Cruise — the self-driving car company that General Motors later acquired and shut down — as head of its artificial intelligence and robotics division.

For the industry, GM’s restructuring is a sign of what enterprise AI adoption actually looks like in practice — not just adding AI tools on top of existing teams, but intentionally rebuilding the workforce from the ground up. The specific capabilities they are being recruited for — agent development, model architecture, and native AI workflows — point directly to the direction in which large enterprise demand is headed.