IBM is laying off employees in its communications and marketing divisions.
On Tuesday, Jonathan Adashek, chief communications officer and SVP of marketing and communications at IBM, led a seven-minute meeting where employees were told that their unit was affected, CNBC reported.
“In 4Q earnings earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce-rebalancing charge that would represent a very low-single-digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with,” IBM said in a statement. “This rebalancing has impacted a limited number of roles across the global marketing and communications team, driven by increases in productivity and our continued push to align our workforce with the skills most in demand among our clients, especially areas such as AI and hybrid cloud."
In May, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company would enact a hiring pause for around 7,800 jobs that AI could replace. In August, he specified that back-office jobs such as those in human resources would be the first that AI replaces, and doubled down on that claim in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In August, Adashek told PRWeek that the process was still in its early days, but that several teams were figuring out how to apply AI to PR.
When asked whether AI could replace comms positions, Adashek offered a familiar narrative in that it should allow PR pros to focus less on repetitive, administrative tasks and more on “being great communicators.”
“We’ve said as a company, we think some of our back-office jobs will be replaced by AI,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that those jobs, that those people are being fired.”
Throughout the hiring pause, IBM opened up positions to develop and maintain AI systems. In January 2023, IBM also said on its earnings call that it was cutting 3,900 positions.
The tech company has said it has been slow to make money from AI products, compared to its competitors Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Its contribution to the AI race is WatsonX, a development studio that trains companies in building and releasing machine-learning models.
In an interview with CNBC, Krishna said that WatsonX has made “low hundreds of millions of dollars” in bookings in Q3 2023 and could make a billion yearly.
The tech industry has made tens of thousands of layoffs this year, repeating the mass layoffs it made in early 2023.
This story first appeared on PRWeek U.S.
