GM just laid off hundreds of IT employees to hire people with stronger AI skills

General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees. This is part of an intentional skills swap to purge employees whose expertise no longer fits and make room for employees with AI-focused backgrounds.

GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it had cut jobs. These were first reported by Bloomberg News.

The automaker said in an emailed statement that the job cuts are a way to prepare for the future, without providing further details. “GM is transforming its information technology organization to better position the company for the future,” the company said.

All of these layoffs are not permanent. A person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring people for IT roles, but is looking for different skills. The most requested capabilities are AI native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompted engineering, and new AI workflows. In fact, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up, including designing systems, training models, and engineering pipelines, rather than just using AI as a productivity tool.

GM has been laying off white-collar employees across multiple departments over the past 18 months to focus resources on priority initiatives, including AI. For example, the company cut approximately 1,000 software employees in August 2024.

The software workforce has undergone significant changes since Sterling Anderson, co-founder of self-driving trucking startup Aurora and a veteran of the self-driving vehicle industry, was hired as chief product officer in May 2025. Last November, three top members of GM’s software team left as Mr. Anderson pushed to combine GM’s disparate technology businesses into one organization. Dave Richardson, Senior Vice President of Software and Services Engineering. and Barak Turovsky, a former Cisco vice president who served as GM’s chief AI officer for just nine months.

GM has since moved to fill that gap with new AI-focused hires. In October, the company hired Behrad Toghi, who previously worked at Apple, as head of AI. The company also hired Rashed Haq as vice president of autonomous vehicles. Haq spent five years as head of AI and robotics at Cruise, a self-driving car company that was acquired by GM and later shut down.

For the industry, GM’s restructuring is a demonstration of what AI implementation in companies actually looks like, not just adding AI tools to existing teams, but intentionally rebuilding the workforce from the ground up. The specific capabilities the company employs (agent development, model engineering, AI-native workflows) are a direct indication of where large enterprise demand is heading.