IBM on Tuesday told employees in its marketing and communications division that it was reducing the size of its staff, according to a person familiar with the matter.
IBM Chief Communications Officer Jonathan Adashek made the announcement in a roughly seven-minute meeting with staff at the unit, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the news has not been made public.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In December, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC that the company was “massively upskilling all of our employees on AI,” when it announced plans to replace about 8,000 jobs with AI in August. . IBM said on its earnings call in January last year that it was cutting 3,900 positions.
The latest cuts come with another round of downsizing in the tech industry. So far this year, some 204 tech companies have cut about 50,000 jobs, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. January was the busiest holiday month since March, as Alphabet, Amazon and Unity announced job cuts.
IBM has returned to growth over the past two years, but expansion has been muted. Revenue in the fourth quarter rose 4% from a year ago even as earnings topped estimates. CFO James Kavanaugh talked about workforce balance on the earnings call.
The company is trying to fit into the emerging AI narrative, which has been a big story across technology since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. “Machine Learning Models.
According to IBM’s earnings call in January, the book of business for generative AI and Watsonx products doubled in size from the third quarter of 2023, when it was in the low hundreds of millions.
IBM faces stiff competition in the enterprise AI realm. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others have similar offerings, and IBM has long been seen as a laggard in the AI race, especially when it comes to monetizing its products. .
“I think it’s a fair criticism,” Krishna told CNBC in December, “that we were slow to monetize and slow to make the learning from the risk that Watson won really usable.” “The mistake we made was I think we went after huge, monolithic answers, which the world wasn’t ready to absorb.”
About two years ago, IBM sold its Watson Health unit to private equity firm Francisco Partners for an undisclosed amount.
This story is in progress. Please check back for updates.