GM recently laid off hundreds of IT workers to hire those with strong AI skills

General Motors has outsourced more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees – in a deliberate shift in skills: freeing up employees whose expertise no longer fits and making room for others with AI-focused backgrounds.

GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it has laid off; first reported by Bloomberg News.

In an emailed statement, the automaker planned the layoffs as a way to prepare for the future, without providing details. “GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future,” the company said.

These layoffs are not all permanent downsizing. A person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that the company is still hiring for roles in its IT department, but in different capacities. The most sought-after skills are native AI development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, and agent and model development, agile engineering, and new AI workflows. In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing systems, training models, and engineering pipelines — not just using AI as a manufacturing tool.

GM has laid off white-collar workers in several departments over the past 18 months, as it focuses its resources on priority systems, including AI. In August 2024, for example, the company cut about 1,000 software employees.

The software staff has undergone a major shakeup since Sterling Anderson — the founder of private trucking company Aurora and a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry — was hired in May 2025 as chief product officer. Last November, three top executives left the company’s software team as Anderson pushed to consolidate GM’s disparate technology businesses into a single organization: Baris Cetinok, senior vice president of software and services product management, Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering, and Barak Turovsky, a former VP at Cisco who spent just nine months as GM’s CEO.

GM has moved to fill the gap with new hires focused on AI. It hired Behrad Toghi, formerly of Apple, in October as its AI leader. The company also brought in Rashed Haq as vice president of autonomous vehicles. Haq spent five years at Cruise — the self-driving car company that was acquired and later shut down by GM — as its head of AI and robotics.

In the industry, GM’s restructuring is a sign of what enterprise AI adoption actually looks like — not just adding AI tools on top of existing teams, but intentionally rebuilding the workforce from the ground up. Some of the skills it’s hiring — agent development, model engineering, AI workflows — point directly to where enterprise demand is headed.