Tech Major IBM Announces Lay-Offs in 2 Divisions in 7-Minute Meeting
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
New Delhi: It takes a life-time to study and build a career, fulfil aspirations, but it took one of the tech giants in the world, IBM, just seven minutes to announce lay-offs, turning the lives of several of its employees topsy turvy.
According to News18, in a seven-minute meeting held last week of the company’s marketing and communications division, Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s chief communications officer, announced the lay-offs to employees. The company did not disclose the number of employees, according to CNBC, and has not even announced it officially.
The move comes in the backdrop of IBM’s chief executive officer Arvind Krishna’s remark last year that the tech major is looking to stop hiring in jobs that could be replaced with artificial intelligence or AI.
“Arvind Krishna said that hiring in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed. He said, “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” the News18 report said.
At the Davos meeting in January this year, too, Krishna said that any job that falls under the umbrella of "digital labor," such as tasks in Human Resources and Finance that can be digitised, “will be affected by generative AI.”
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"It is the first technology that goes after the white collar work or what I will call the lower half of cognitive work ... It doesn't matter whether you're a physicist, mathematician, a computer scientist, a doctor, a writer," he had said.
According to news reports, this is not the first time that IBM is laying off staff. In January 2023, it had announced that it would be slashing close to 4,000 jobs.
The tech industry is seeing a massive shake-up since the past one year.
At least 204 companies, including IBM, have announced around 50,000 job cuts in 2024 as per layoffs.fyi website.
In India, over 36,000 employees were laid off in tech companies in 2022 and 2023. In the same period, globally around 4,25,000 employees were eased out, including in start-ups, said the web site.
Among the big companies that have announced lay-offs in 2024 so far are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Swiggy, eBay, PayPal, Tik Tok, YouTube among others.
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