- General Motors has laid off about 600 IT employees — more than 10% of the department.
- The company is hiring for AI-native development, data engineering, cloud engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering.
- GM previously cut about 1,000 software workers in August 2024 and lost three top software executives in November 2025.
- Behrad Toghi (ex-Apple) joined as AI lead in October 2025; Rashed Haq, a former Cruise head of AI and robotics, joined as VP of autonomous vehicles.
What Happened
General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department — about 600 salaried employees — in what TechCrunch described as a deliberate skills swap, the publication reported on Monday. The layoffs were first reported by Bloomberg News. GM confirmed the action in an emailed statement, saying: “GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.”
Why It Matters
The cuts are not net-zero reductions: a person familiar with the layoffs told TechCrunch that GM is still hiring for IT, but for different skills. The most-sought-after capabilities, per TechCrunch, are AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows. In practical terms, GM is rebuilding for engineers who build with AI from the ground up, not those who use AI as a productivity supplement. The action is the latest data point in a 2026 pattern in which large enterprises — Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, GitLab — have framed headcount reductions as funding redirection toward agentic AI products.
Technical Details
The 600-employee figure represents more than 10% of GM’s IT organisation. In August 2024, GM cut about 1,000 software workers as part of an earlier restructuring. In November 2025, three top executives left the company’s software team during a consolidation effort led by Sterling Anderson, the former Aurora cofounder hired as GM’s chief product officer in May 2025: 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 Cisco VP who served only nine months as GM’s chief AI officer. GM has moved to fill the gap with new AI-focused hires, including Behrad Toghi, previously of Apple, who joined as AI lead in October 2025, and Rashed Haq, who spent five years at Cruise — the self-driving subsidiary GM acquired and later shuttered — as head of AI and robotics; Haq joined as GM’s vice president of autonomous vehicles.
Who’s Affected
The 600 departed employees are the direct group. Other large enterprises restructuring around AI — including Stellantis, Ford, Toyota in the auto sector, and across industries IBM, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan — will read GM’s move as an explicit template. For AI-native developers, prompt engineers, and agent-product specialists, GM joins the list of companies actively hiring in the category. For displaced workers, the cuts illustrate a specific skill mismatch in IT departments built around traditional systems-management, networking, and incremental-software-development capabilities.
What’s Next
GM did not disclose the dollar value of the restructuring or the timeline for backfilling new AI roles. The pattern is likely to continue across the auto sector, where companies including Ford, Stellantis, and Toyota are similarly investing in agentic AI and autonomous-vehicle software stacks. Industry analysts at McKinsey and Bain have repeatedly forecast that 10–20% of large-enterprise IT functions will be reshaped over the next 36 months by similar skills-mix changes.
