Hundreds of Google employees who sell ads to big businesses are being laid off

Days after laying off more than a thousand employees from Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Google Assistant and core engineering divisions, Google is cutting “hundreds of roles” on its advertising sales team, a company spokesperson told Engadget on Tuesday.

“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers,” the company said in a statement. “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 spokesperson declined to share information about the exact number of employees impacted by the cuts or where they were located. The news was first reported by Business Insider, which obtained a memo that Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler sent staff on Tuesday.

Google’s latest cuts continue the trend of layoffs at tech companies, which shed thousands of jobs in 2023. In the first two weeks of this year, for instance Amazon cut hundreds of workers in video game streaming service Twitch, Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Audible. Discord, Meta, Unity and Duolingo have also let go employees in 2024.

In December, The Information reported that Google was planning to reorganize its ad sales unit, which has more than 30,000 people, in favor of using machine learning to help customers buy more ads on flagship products like Google Search and YouTube, which is how the company makes a bulk of its revenue. Most of the company’s cuts taking place today will focus on ad sales teams selling ads to large businesses.

Meanwhile, the company is reportedly throwing millions of dollars of stock at select researchers at DeepMind, its artificial intelligence unit, to stop them from decamping to rivals like OpenAI. 

The big news in tech right now is CES in Las Vegas and our team has been on the ground all week checking out the new products. A surprising amount of what we saw is already available for purchase, but very few of those things are discounted. As for what is on sale, this turned out to be a decent week for deals on current model devices, with some hitting all-time lows. The Google Pixel 8 smartphones are back to Black Friday lows, as is one of our favorite fitness trackers. A set of Tile trackers is cheaper than ever and the Apple Watch Series 9 has returned to $329. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.