GM cuts 600 IT staff in deliberate skills swap toward AI-native engineers

TL;DR:

• General Motors has cut roughly 10 per cent of its IT department, around 600 salaried roles, framing the move as a “transformation” of the IT organisation rather than a straight headcount reduction.
• The company is still hiring inside IT, but for a narrower set of skills: AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering and new AI workflows.
• Resultsense view: this is the cleanest public example to date of an enterprise treating AI capability as a workforce-replacement strategy rather than a tooling upgrade, and the specific skill list — agent development, AI-native pipelines — is exactly where UK enterprise IT departments will face equivalent pressure over the next year.

GM confirmed the layoffs after they were first reported by Bloomberg News. In an emailed statement, the carmaker said: “GM is transforming its Information Technology organisation to better position the company for the future.” A person familiar with the cuts told TechCrunch the company is rehiring across the same department, just for different capabilities.

A pattern, not a one-off

This is the latest in a sequence of GM white-collar layoffs over roughly the last 18 months. The company cut about 1,000 software staff in August 2024 as it concentrated resources on what it described as high-priority initiatives — AI included. The software workforce has also been reshaped at executive level since chief product officer Sterling Anderson, a former Aurora co-founder, joined in May 2025. Three senior software leaders departed in November as Anderson consolidated GM’s technology businesses into a single organisation.

GM has since hired Behrad Toghi, previously of Apple, as AI lead, and Rashed Haq, formerly head of AI and robotics at Cruise, as vice president of autonomous vehicles. The recruitment pattern points to the type of engineer GM thinks it needs: people who can build with AI from the foundations, not bolt it on as a productivity tool.

What it signals for UK enterprises

The structural lesson translates directly into the UK market. Large UK employers — banks, retailers, telcos, professional-services firms — are already running internal AI productivity programmes, but few have publicly recharacterised their IT workforces around AI-native skills. GM’s restructure makes that a visible boardroom option. For UK SMEs supplying enterprise IT services, the demand profile is shifting from generalist application maintenance toward agent design, model deployment and AI workflow engineering — the same skills GM is buying.

Looking forward

Expect more enterprise IT restructures in this shape, and more politically careful framing of them as “transformation” rather than redundancy. The UK debate over AI and white-collar work has so far focused on consumer-facing roles; GM’s move suggests the more measurable disruption may be the deliberate skills swap inside internal IT functions, where the cost of getting the rehire mix wrong is borne by IT supplier ecosystems and graduate pipelines well beyond the firm doing the cutting.