At an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, Alphabet officials dressed as Halloween characters answered concerns from worried staff members after remarks made during the company’s earnings call that suggested further cost reductions were on the horizon.
According to a meeting tape that CNBC examined, Brian Ong, vice president of Google recruitment, stated, “There is a reality to it.” “Compared to a few years ago, we are hiring fewer people now.”
Ong said that there are fewer open positions and that geographic hiring has altered, “so you may see fewer roles available where you are.” Ong was explicitly answering a query concerning retention and advancement chances.
A Google representative chose not to respond.
Following Alphabet’s better-than-expected third-quarter sales and profits announcement on Tuesday, which caused the stock to rise, the meeting was held. Ruth Porat’s successor, CFO Anat Ashkenazi, declared she planned to “push a little further” with cost cuts throughout the organization during a teleconference with investors.
Ashkenazi donned a jersey of former Indiana Pacers great Reggie Miller, while Jeff Dean, the head scientist at Google, attended the conference dressed as a starfish. Sundar Pichai, the CEO, was wearing a black t-shirt with the words “ERROR 404 COSTUME NOT FOUND” with a pixelated dinosaur picture on it.
As Google increases its investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025, Ashkenazi stated that making more savings will be one of her top goals in her new position.
This trend has persisted since 2023, when the market and economy turned around. In order to keep up with the growing rivalry in the AI weapons race, Google has begun reorganizing its staff. As previously reported by CNBC, this has resulted in layoffs and organizational reorganizations, which have caused employees to experience a “decline in morale.”
Google has reduced the size of its Silicon Valley marketing, cloud, and security teams as well as its trust and safety section in recent months.
Google is hardly the only one. This week, Dropbox declared that it will fire 20% of its employees worldwide, while Amazon is still discontinuing a number of initiatives. According to internal documents seen by CNBC, Google employees have voiced concerns that the business is planning further layoffs, potentially when the year is out.
The quarterly call, Pichai joked, was Ashkenazi’s ideal prelude to the business gathering.
To laughter from the audience, Pichai remarked, “I was telling Anat yesterday, earnings calls are a piece of cake compared to TGIF the next day.”
Among the queries and remarks from the staff were compliments on “another great quarter,” achievements in semiconductor development, and enhancements to Google’s popular AI note-taking app NotebookLM. Other inquiries, however, revealed concern about the potential effects of increased cost savings on the workforce.
“What did the remarks about additional headcount efficiencies mean exactly?” According to Ashkenazi’s remarks from the teleconference, one question was posed.
Employees are “one of the most important assets we have,” according to Ashkenazi, who did not provide any other information. In the third quarter, the firm employed 1,000 fresh graduates, she added, demonstrating its commitment to investing in people.
“Unusual period of capital expenditure progress”
Pichai, who has been advocating for efficiency for over two years, added his voice to support earlier opinions.
“An example of finding efficiencies in headcount as well is if you have to do something new and it will require ten people, if you can find a way to do it with eight people by making smart trade-offs somewhere and aligning teams better,” Pichai stated.
Pichai said, “If we are making companywide decisions, we’ll definitely let you know,” to another query concerning current layoffs and reorganizations as well as potential future developments.
According to him, the corporation is now investing a lot of money in AI, but this desire to increase spending won’t persist indefinitely.
Pichai declared, “We are experiencing a remarkable era of capital expenditure progress.” “As an industry, we are going through a transition when these technological shifts occur. At the beginning, you invest disproportionately, and then the curve gets better.”
He went on to say that senior executives do not make all of the cuts.
He remarked, “It’s not like all of these decisions are made centrally at a company level.” “There may therefore be times when small groups of people are impacted due to the size of our organization.”
Using AI internally is one method to increase cost efficiency, Ashkenazi said on Tuesday. According to the corporation, AI currently generates 25% of new code.
Brian Saluzzo, who leads “Core” developers, responded to a query on productivity by stating that although the 25% pertains to low-level jobs, leadership is currently “expanding to more complex areas” inside the organization.
The teams that provide the technological framework for Google’s major products are referred to as “core.” In a restructure that includes rehiring certain positions in Mexico and India, Google fired off more than 200 workers from its Core engineering teams, according to a May CNBC story.
“It’s worth challenging us to think where we can use AI to be more productive in this transition moment, across all functions, everywhere in the company,” Pichai continued.
He went on to say that employees should “strive to do more” and “assist customers worldwide in taking those lessons as well” through 2025.
