IBM told employees on Tuesday that it was cutting jobs in its marketing and communications division. IBM is the latest in a wave of technology companies to announce layoffs earlier this year.
IBM communications director Jonathan Adashek told employees about the cuts during a seven-minute staff meeting with the unit: – a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.
It is currently unclear how many people IBM plans to lay off at this point.
“In its fourth quarter results, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge earlier this year that would represent a very low single-digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to end 2024 with approximately the same staffing levels as we started,” a spokesperson companies told Quartz in a statement.
IBM focuses on artificial intelligence
The statement continued: “This rebalancing is driven by productivity gains and our ongoing desire to align our workforce with the skills that are most in demand among our customers, especially in areas such as artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud.”
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, IBM announced it planned to lay off 1.5% of its global workforce.
Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Bloomberg that figure equates to about 3,900 jobs. Kavanaugh added that the company still expects to hire in “higher growth areas.”
In May 2023, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company could replace almost 8,000 back-office positions as human resources thanks to artificial intelligence in the next five years.
The technical layoff disaster continues
IBM adds to almost 50,000 layoffs in the technology sector in just the first three months of 2024. Tech giants like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, all of which are from Google, have announced job cuts in 2024. They were recently joined by: Sony, BabbleAND Expedia.
