General Motors Cuts 600 IT Jobs in Deliberate Shift Toward AI-Focused Workforce

General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department — approximately 600 salaried employees — as part of a deliberate effort to replace traditional technology roles with positions requiring artificial intelligence expertise, underscoring a broader restructuring trend sweeping the automotive sector.

The company said the cuts were not a cost-reduction measure in isolation but a skills swap, clearing headcount to recruit IT workers with AI-native backgrounds. GM acknowledged the exchange will not be one-to-one, meaning the net effect on employment will likely be negative.

The capabilities GM is prioritizing include AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows. In practical terms, the company is seeking employees who can build with AI from the ground up — designing systems, training models, and engineering data pipelines — rather than workers who use AI simply as a productivity aid.

GM's move reflects a pattern that has accelerated across Detroit's three largest automakers. Ford, GM, and Stellantis have collectively eliminated more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs, representing 19% of their combined workforces, from recent employment peaks this decade, according to calculations citing industry data. While a variety of factors drove those cuts, technological change — including AI adoption — has been a consistent thread.

The restructuring comes as automotive companies race to integrate AI into core operations, though the results have been uneven. Anecdotes from engineers and founders suggest that not all companies have a clear strategy for deploying the technology, even as they invest heavily in it.

One company in the adjacent fleet-technology space appears to have found a viable model. Samsara, which has spent roughly a decade installing cameras inside millions of commercial trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention, and liability documentation, used that data to train a proprietary model capable of detecting potholes and assessing how quickly road conditions are deteriorating. The company has begun pitching the product to municipalities and said it has signed contracts with several cities, including Chicago.

The GM layoffs arrive against a backdrop of growing public skepticism about AI's role in the labor market. At a recent University of Central Florida commencement ceremony, an executive who declared that "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution" was met with sustained booing from the graduating audience. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar reception at the University of Arizona, where students loudly booed when he told them, "You will help shape artificial intelligence." A recent Gallup poll found that only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it is a good time to find a job locally — down sharply from 75% in 2022.

For GM and its peers, the workforce calculus is straightforward even if politically fraught: legacy IT skills are being devalued at speed, while demand for workers who can architect AI systems is climbing. Whether the automakers can recruit enough qualified candidates to offset the roles being eliminated remains an open question — one that will likely define the industry's technology trajectory over the next several years.