General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees.
The move amounts to GM cutting hundreds of IT jobs in order to hire AI specialists. GM confirmed the layoffs and the company is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.
What makes the move stand out is that GM is not simply shrinking its tech workforce. The company is still hiring for roles inside the IT department, but for very different capabilities.
The most sought-after areas now include “AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, and agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows.” In practical terms, GM is looking for people who can build AI systems from the ground up, not just use AI tools to work faster.
The shift is part of a broader software overhaul
The layoffs fit into a larger reorganization that has been unfolding inside GM’s software and product teams over the past year and a half.
TechCrunch reported that the company has cut white-collar employees across several departments in the last 18 months as it redirects resources toward high-priority initiatives, including AI. It pointed to a previous round of cuts in August 2024, when GM eliminated about 1,000 software jobs.
That restructuring accelerated after Sterling Anderson, the Aurora co-founder and autonomous vehicle veteran, joined GM in May 2025 as chief product officer.
The company’s software workforce has undergone “significant change” since then, including the exit last November of three top software executives: Baris Cetinok, Dave Richardson, and former chief AI officer Barak Turovsky.
GM has since moved to refill some of that gap with new AI-focused leaders, including Behrad Toghi as AI lead and Rashed Haq as vice president of autonomous vehicles.
This is what enterprise AI adoption looks like on the ground
The bigger significance of the layoffs is not just that GM wants more AI talent. It is that the company appears to be reorganizing around a different definition of technical work.
The shift is a signal of what enterprise AI adoption “actually looks like in practice” — not merely adding AI tools on top of existing teams, but rebuilding parts of the workforce around new skills such as model engineering, agent development, and AI-native workflows.
MSN shared that, for a traditional automaker, that matters because software is no longer limited to infotainment systems or internal business tools. Carmakers are increasingly treating AI, cloud systems, analytics, and automation as core parts of how vehicles are developed, how services are delivered, and how engineering teams operate.
In that environment, the value of a tech employee is being measured less by legacy IT support skills and more by whether they can design, train, integrate, and maintain AI-driven systems.
A workforce signal well beyond GM
GM’s latest cuts are likely to resonate beyond Detroit because they point to a broader labor shift already underway across large companies. The message is not simply that AI will eliminate jobs.
It is that employers are increasingly using AI as a reason to redefine which technical skills still count.
In GM’s case, the layoffs and rehiring push suggest that even workers inside a technology organization are no longer protected if their expertise does not line up with where the company believes software is heading next.
