Google to replace part of ad sales team with AI

In an extension to its restructuring strategy planned last year to maintain investor sentiment and adjust to market conditions, Google is continuing to lay off staffers across its various divisions.

Google’s advertainment sales (ad sales) team is the latest to be impacted with at least a few hundred staffers laid off on Tuesday.

The job reductions, which were first reported by Business Insider, are likely to impact employees in the large customer sales unit within the overall ad sales team. This will make the smaller customer sales unit, dubbed the Google Customer Solutions team, the core team.

Google’s ad sales team, which had approximately 30,000 staffers before the layoffs, was expected to rely heavily on machine learning to automate advertising, thereby reducing the need for a large number of employees in the advertisement sales teams.  

Reports also suggest that some staffers from the ad sales team were laid off in October last year.

“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers,” a Google spokesperson said. “We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. As part of this, a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles on the team or elsewhere at Google.”

The restructuring of the ad sales team should come as no surprise, as the company last week said that some of its teams are continuing to execute their reorientation strategy decided in the second half of last year to better align with market opportunities.

Last week, the company confirmed that it had laid off hundreds of employees from several teams, including engineering and the teams responsible for its digital voice assistant and hardware products, including Fitbit wearable devices and Pixel smartphones.

Other Alphabet divisions have also faced the axe over the last 12 months with layoffs beginning in January 2023.

The company, which faces stiff competition from Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and Oracle in the field of generative AI, had then said that it was looking to trade non-technical roles for engineering and technical talent.

Several large technology companies including Meta, Amazon, IBM, SAP, Cisco, and Salesforce have also had to bear the brunt of layoffs across 2022 and 2023, especially due to mounting pressure from an uncertain economy and slowing revenue growth.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, the online tracker keeping tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 1,186 tech companies have laid off about 262,682 staff in 2023, compared to 164,969 layoffs in 2022.

Another data compilation from the online tracker showed that at least 51 companies have laid off around 7,528 employees in the first two weeks of 2024. These companies include Amazon, Intel, Instagram, ARM Holdings, Citrix, and Trend Micro.